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| ImageCredit: Satiiva "Fire Dance" |
A weak and
unconscious person wants revenge in response to emotional, mental, or physical
pain, while a strong and conscious person is able to learn and forgive in
response to pain. This is the main difference – do we own the pain and learn
from what we are experiencing, knowing that we have created it, or do we blame
someone and project our pain outside onto something/someone else, seeing
that/them as the cause? If we own the pain, we build the Self and increase
our consciousness. If we project the pain, we only program the lesson to repeat
– until we get it.
“Owning the
pain” means taking responsibility for your own reaction of pain to the external
or internal stimuli. We might not have a choice in receiving some of the
stimuli from life, but we always have a choice in the perception of that
stimuli – i.e. it is up to us how we see what has occurred. And if we have
ended up experiencing pain, this means that we chose to
react to the stimuli in the emotional, mental, physical or existential pain.
Another issue
with painful life stimuli is our judgment of it. A weak and unconscious person
sees emotional and mental pain in a similar manner to the physical response of
an animal – i.e. “pain is bad/wrong” – but since he/she is a person, not an
animal, there is also the personality involvement, which attempts to place that
pain in the cause and effect cycle – i.e. it becomes “pain is bad/wrong and
either I caused it to myself, or someone else caused it to me”. Either way one
is already on the lookout for “who is at fault for the pain” because of the
initial assumption that the pain was “wrong”. Some people tend to automatically
project the responsibility for the pain to everyone else but themselves.
Others, who generally are in the in between stage of not-quite-unconscious and
not-completely-conscious either – these individuals tend to see themselves at
fault for their own experience of pain. A conscious person would take
responsibility for their own experience but will not blame themselves for it!
The difference here is in the initial assumption that the “pain is wrong”. Why
is it “wrong”? It is uncomfortable for sure, it is generally undesired. But
wrong?...
Pain is not
“wrong” (not that it is “right” either!) – it is an experience of friction. A
conscious being can still experience the friction of duality, but it will not
be labeled as “pain”. A better label might be "discomfort”. And
discomfort is an essential component of growth and learning. No one can move
into anything new if they are not ever willing to be uncomfortable! Thus, no
learning, no Self/Soul building can occur is we are not willing to be
uncomfortable!
If we know that
pain is not wrong but a type of label on our experience of friction (from being
in duality), then 3 things occur:
- we do not project the responsibility for that pain outside of ourselves;
- we do not go into self-blame, looking for the fault in our own behavior;
- we can change the label of that pain to “discomfort”, thus dis-arming it and learning from it.
Wise words...
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