Bliss and Pain - Short Essay

A deeply spiritual person, meaning a person ruled more by the eternal part of them than their body, has learned to feel bliss or joy simultaneously with pain, sometimes in tremendous amounts. They understand the temporary dual nature of their condition – an eternal part clothed in a temporary part – and they live from that paradigm. They feel pain the same as the rest of us, they just don’t suffer because of it. This is because they have trained themselves to not create a “poor me” story around pain. They know the eternal “me” does NOT suffer; only the body/mind suffers if there is no story that creates emotion around a painful event or circumstance. This is the lesson of the great teachers over time. Jesus said that when we are fasting we should not appear to others that we are fasting. This wise counsel disables our flighty egos in two ways. First, it disallows ego to feed off other’s opinions of us. Others don’t see the “pain of the fast” on our faces so they can’t say how wonderful we are for doing it. Secondly, it discourages a story behind our fast because it is less effective to create one around it when there is no one else to support it. We would have to tell ourselves ONLY about the pain, which is far less satisfying to the ego. Victor Frankl learned this lesson in a brutal concentration camp. The Buddha knew it, as did the self-immolated Buddhist monks protesting the Vietnam War. Every sage and shaman the world over has known it as well. The lesson is this: “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”