Theos-Talk Archives (July 1998 Message tt00190)

Just a few additional comments of my own on the subject
of the necessity of suffering ...

Life, as I see it, is bittersweet, with both pleasure
and pain mixed in with every experience. Life can be
enjoyed or suffered depending upon how we react to it.

We're taught to be indifferent to pleasure and pain.
This does not mean that we don't enjoy pleasure and
keenly feel pain -- rather it means that whatever happens,
we take it the right way.

The external events of life, including our sensations
and feelings, are something that we react to. We can
actively avoid pain, but that avoidance of pain, if it
means becoming obsessed with running away from it, is
really a denial of life.

If we don't avoid life, but plunge fully into it with
complete enjoyment, then the keynote feeling, the background
theme, the "soundtrack" is one of bliss rather than suffering.

When there's total enjoyment, total engulfment in our
activity, total expressiveness and fullness in an action,
we are in a transcendent awareness, a blissful state, a
high experience. What we do may bring both pleasure and
pain, but there's no sense of suffering, no self-created
misery to what is happening.

Basically, suffering is self-created misery, something
we add to a painful experience, something that arises out
of a denial and rejection of life. Bliss is the opposite,
self-created joy, something we might add to the same
painful experience, something that arises out of a glad
acceptance and joyful participation in life.

The distinction is between the raw feelings of life,
when further qualified by glad acceptance or hurt rejection.
This "something more" that we add to our feelings also
works the same with our thoughts, as we create for ourselves,
with our minds, either a bright and glowing world, or a
dark, hateful, dog-eat-dog world. And, I think, it's not
merely that we fool ourselves into seeing what we want to
see. Rather, we are actively creating the world about us
both by our external actions and our perceptions of the
world. Those perceptions color the world as much as the
things that we physically do.

-- Eldon