Until now, our lives have been largely devoted to running from pain and problems. We fled from them as from a plague. We never wanted to deal with the fact of suffering.
The chief activator of our defects has been self-centered fear - primarily fear that we would lose something we already possessed or would fail to get something we demanded. Living upon a basis of unsatisfied demands, we were in a state of continual disturbance and frustration.
There is more than one reminder in the literature that we find any pain or discomfort to be anathema. We do not want to have to experience it. We want to go around it, to take evasive action, or to put something into our body to make it disappear or fade into the background: alcohol, drugs, caffeine, nicotine, sugar, the endorphins that come from exercise or sex or work. We never wanted to deal with suffering. Jeez, how direct is that? I've come to believe that there's a big difference between pain - which is inevitable - and suffering - which is an emotional reaction to pain. The plague! That's what we think pain is
And then there's this reminder that our destiny is to be disturbed as long as we allow fear to drive our emotional reaction to people, places, and things. To make us run from pain and look for pleasure. We're always going to be dissatisfied. We don't have what we want and then, when we do get it, we're afraid it's going to be taken away.
But also like others, we often discover a greater challenge in the lesser and more continuous problems of life. Our answer is in still more spiritual development.
The development of our spiritual selves is never-ending. We're never going to be done. And the funny thing - wry funny, not ha-ha funny - is that we're likely to suffer the most from the small, ordinary bedevilments that bedevil the best of us. We're going to handle death and dismemberment better than the pox of the guy in front of us not using his turn signal.
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