One Reason Why we Suffer
Tonight I wondered some questions that seem simple, but are not. Why is it we so often act to hurt ourselves, and increase our own suffering?
The first effect of suffering – simply feeling pain and sadness -- if truly accepted, then leads to a second step. Opening heart, the most natural response is self-comforting, to care about our sorrows, to simply open to our own pain. Perhaps the first reason why we cause ourselves suffering ,is to simply learn to love ourselves more, in comforting that pain.
We create this pain to give ourselves an opportunity for self-caring. The first object of learning to love is, of course, oneself. The way of open heart begins with compassion for our own pain. If we learn to love more, perhaps next time we'll be less likely to hurt ourselves, by thought, word, and deed.
Yet, what about all the children born into poverty or warfare? All those so innocent, so much harmed and damaged by human society? Their hardship is not some emotional self-conflict, it is not neurosis, it is truly at the hands of others.
And yet, what about karma, the idea of "higher self programming life-lessons" before we’re born? This is the idea of soul agreement, human experience pre-chosen for learning and growth, the plans made before we are born. It’s hard to imagine why souls would choose such a miserable life.
Yet, if we truly are souls, then even such painful human travail was planned from a higher dimension.
Perhaps for them too, from ancient karma we don’t understand, there is the same need, the need to learn or re-learn self-love, through the spiritual demand to experience a painful life. On planet earth, it seems suffering is the major catalyst to help us learn to love. It's a hard way to learn, for sure.
So I wonder, perhaps we all choose personal hardship to learn open heart. So we cause ourselves suffering -- to encourage ourselves to learn self-comforting. And thereby to open heart, learning what love really is, starting with ourselves and those who suffer with us.
Surely, we live in a world of great troubles, confusion, and strife. Thankfully, this life is not forever, it is temporary like a dream or bubble, a shadow of eternity, a dance we don't comprehend. When the dream becomes a nightmare, the first work is self-comforting.
Scott, I totally agree that it's to open heart, to practice self-love. I'd been feeling it as the "answer" for the last few years but certainly, my ego thought, it couldn't be that simple. Through a couple years of consistent mindfulness/awareness practices, I was actually opening heart, feeling the beginnings of loving-kindness and mercy, etc.
ReplyDeleteFor reasons likely to be ego resistance, the realization that this was "it" and it was this simple came to me in the summer of 2009 after asking about it with sincere intent. Right after that, ironically, I was introduced to David Wilcock's work and, subsequently, yours. I got so excited, intellectually stimulated and a little distracted by all this that I veered from staying focused on the simplicity of self-love and opening heart. Now, I hope, I am ready to integrate it all. Reading your post today got me really enthused that, like you, I am integrating it all. And, it confirmed and validated that self-love is not egotistical or of a lower vibration. Even though we're not "human," we still need to love the human experience.
Thanks for all you've done, especially in FROM ELSEWHERE!!!
Dear Prodigal Daughter,
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for your posting here, and it's ironic how the complexity of mind rejects the simplicity of just what heals the most. In the Ra Material, there's an interesting passage about so-called 'ego':
Questioner: Can you tell me how you balance the ego?
Ra: I am Ra. We cannot work with this concept as it is misapplied and understanding cannot come from it.
http://www.lawofone.info/results.php?search_string=ego&search_type=any&ss=1
As you probably know, Buddhism too rejects the notion of ego and substantial, separate selfhood; not that there is 'no self,' just that 'what we are' is truly neither a fixed self nor nothing-at-all. To me, this teaching is quite liberating; there is no enemy within, simply patterns of constriction, grasping, imbalance, unhealed wounding.
You're so right, 'even though we're not human, we still need to love the human experience.' Ironic in the extreme it is, that those most tuned to loving humanity are those who are visitors to this world!
As Morpheus in the Matrix said, "fate, it seems, is not without its sense of irony."
Many blessings to your light, it is bright, and you're wholly all you ever need to be.