Posts Tagged Suffering
Correct This Unseen Cause of Self-Punishment
Posted by davev in Start Thinking on November 18th, 2009
The first serving of any punishing wish or act towards another always goes to the one who dishes it out!
The Secret Teaching of the Ages
It is impossible to change the relationship that you have with the world around you without changing the relationship that you have in yourself, with yourself. Before you can become the kind of human being who never again hurts another — either in thought or deed — you must change the relationship you have with yourself.
This is the secret teaching of the ages. Inside of it, we learn about the necessity for a new kind of mind. We learn about the possibility of a world within ourselves that is presently guarded — not by something that is keeping us out because it is something so elevated, powerful, and high that there’s no way that we can scale it — but because we have yet to scale the depths of our own ignorance.
We refuse to understand the pain that our own ignorance causes. We refuse to recognize that it’s impossible for us to have the pain we have with other people without ourselves being a participant in it. Ultimately, we refuse the beautiful lessons that life brings to us, and instead of going through the transformation they are intended to produce for us, we become individuals who simply wrap ourselves deeper and deeper in the same nature that is the source of our suffering.
The new mind begins to discover that the reason that it continues to be a prisoner is because it continues to live from a prisoner mentality. A prisoner mentality is blaming anything outside of you for the pain you have. Was there a person who did something terrible? Yes. This planet is full of toxic, cruel human beings — victims themselves of a pain they can’t escape. Does that mean that you should spend your life running, hiding, resenting what was? That you should stay wrapped up in some kind of dark state because something in you revisits the past? No! Up to this moment, you haven’t known that the pain you feel isn’t because of what’s taking place in the present, but is born out of something inside of you that has become a prisoner of your own past.
Something in you calls up a person, or a condition outside of yourself that reminds you of a person, and at that moment, what happens? Something in you grabs onto whoever it was that you blame for your pain, and “bang” — bitterness, sorrow, regret, or rage results. You grant power to the nature that defeats you every time you think about what someone did or didn’t do.
There is freedom in realizing — seeing the truth of the fact — that whatever is holding you captive right now has no right to do so. None! The split second that you see you’re a captive of your own mind, you have the freedom to challenge it with the new understanding that belongs to your new, true mind — a mind that can’t be made a prisoner of anything.
Refuse to carry forward with you one more day any thought that tells you there is someone to be punished for the way you feel. Refuse to be made a subject of ignorance, to live in the darkness of days past, calling it the present moment because of how much pain there is in it. Your mind will begin to move in new ways because it is living in a broader world, and it is no longer a captive of its own past emotional content.
Learn or Burn: It’s Your Choice!
Posted by davev in Start Thinking on May 1st, 2009
The belief that you have no choice but to keep suffering through whatever frightens you is like believing you have to hold onto a scalding cup so that you won’t spill your coffee!
The Secret to Healing What Pains You
There is at work in us an undetected nature that will not allow the cause of our pain to pass so that healing may take place. Can we see that we have parts of us that just won’t let go of being angry with someone who got angry with us? But that’s not all!
Can we also see that these same smoldering parts of ourselves would have us believe that being on fire is the best way to get over being burned? Of course! Once we bring such self-destructive behavior out into the light we can also see that these actions must be unconscious to us; no one would consciously harm him- or herself.
Any part of us trying to drag us into a heated stew over “who” or “what” should be blamed for our pain is secretly working to divide and conquer us. This spiritual fact cannot be overstated, nor should the understanding of its rescuing power be underestimated, which is why we will now bring light into this dark deception.
In that moment when we are thrown into emotional conflict, regardless of its initial cause, the first step this in-the-dark nature takes to deceive us is to direct our awareness away from the actual hurt we feel. It accomplishes this mean feat by its second step: it mis-leads us into placing our attention on the enemy outside of us, that person or condition that it points to as being responsible for our pain.
Once this unconscious self has succeeded in dividing us up in this manner, we now have less than half the possible powers that we need to heal. And if this wasn’t bad enough, the remaining forces of light needed for our healing are themselves now half compromised by subsequent negative reactions that tell us to lash out at whatever it is that has been blamed for our pain!
The next time any pain — be it an old familiar one, or an altogether new ache — pushes itself in upon you, come wide-awake to yourself and remember this last important step: Do not try to do one thing with any psychological pain that passes through you, other than to remain as awake as you can to its presence within you. Then, into this conscious self-awareness bring the following new understanding: this pain is not you but, in reality, constitutes a calling out from the injured part of you to a Higher Power to be healed. Your job is to see that the call gets through. Nothing more, nothing less.
If you will do your part in fulfilling this higher plan for healing what pains you — and agree to simply hold this hurt of yours in the light of your own higher self-awareness — then the healing you hope for cannot be denied and has, in some ways, already occurred. All you need to do is remain true to this principle as it works itself out within you. The rest is done for you.
– Guy Finley
