Pain

It is less than obvious, but it has become my firm conviction that those who hurt the most feel the least.  Pain beyond a certain point causes a sort of emotional swelling, which performs the same role for the psyche that actual swelling does for injured limbs: it immobilizes and protects you.  Inflexibility is the outcome of unprocessed emotions, and inflexibility, in turn, is the cause of most misery in this world; it is the rejection of what is, in favor of what was or what one feels should be.

Those who are cruel hurt the most.  This is not obvious, because they will have thoroughly buried their pain, and even appear outwardly in some cases happy.  Yet, we all to some greater or lesser extent built artificial selves, artifacts of experiences we often cannot remember, and in response to social needs.  Any self built upon the need to see pain in others cannot be real, cannot face the world as it is, cannot, in the end, be at peace or ever be fulfilled.

As I watch myself, look inwardly, what I see is that self is almost always tied to the introjection of some authority or principle.  Who you are is who your fathermother was, or what you saw written in some book, or decided at some point.  You are this out of habit.  You repeat patterns.  But is that you?  Is that even a useful question?  We want to be happy, do we not?  Does repetition best serve this end?  I don’t think so.

Increasingly, I feel that the highest attainment is to process the world with full consciousness of all the filters within one, and finally to process it as it is, without filter.  This is of course an old idea, but what I would suggest is that most of what gets called spiritual growth is nothing but the advance of personal emotional well being, and nearly fully encompassed by good psychology.

Few thoughts.