(06-07-2012, 04:42 PM)Avocado Wrote: [ -> ]I'm becoming increasingly aware of the immense pain residing within the confines of my body. It is manifesting itself more intensely and forcibly by the day. I am angry, frustrated, deeply sad (heartfelt), irritated and yearning for something more. I would think I'm bipolar if I didn't have spiritual strength. I extract immense joy from the little things. Tastes and sights bring me brief moments of bliss. I am acting with a strange mixture of spirituality and darkness. I am nearing the boundary of the dark night. With everything I've seen and experienced, the cessation of the dark night is inevitable. I simply cannot bare the frustration any longer. I am sick of experience, I am sick of sensations. I just want it all to end. This transcends mere suicidal thoughts. Suicide would just lead to more sensations. As of the moment, I am building toward some sort of critical mass. If it wasn't for meditation, this would be very ugly.
Life is irritating, life is joyful. Where is the middle ground? How can I see this for what it is? I know that only I can answer that. This is simply my way of blowing off steam, or perhaps more. I'm speaking to the only people (who I know) who accept the fact that we grow in our own unique ways. Thank you for letting me be myself. It is unbelievably freeing.
Hey Avocado, I think that the Buddha equated life (as in the incarnational life) with suffering: two ways to say the same thing.
I've been to, and will cyclically, though without discernible pattern, return to those places where I'm tired of all experience, both the seeming good and the bad. My outward circumstances are often favorable, but inside I can become consumed by an all-pervading, origin-less, face-less, nameless Pain. Constricts and contracts me it does, limiting the faculties of my consciousness to perceive, interact, and function. And with what feels like an impaired mind, the prison walls feel all the more unbearable.
At its most acute I've found that the best thing to do is nothing. While "nothing" isn't an entirely accurate term, I try to let my energy
rest in non-activity as much as possible. Just lie low, lie still, and rest all possible effort except that which the moment physically requires. The Chinese finger puzzle helps to illustrate the way of non-effort as a viable solution to entrapment.
Though there are any number of proximate causes for pain and confusion, I think at the root is the primal pain of separation, of maintaining this individual identity in the face of what we really are, infinity. That hurts. Continually.
Though infinitely valuable to the Creator, it's an often tortuous thing to the incarnate self to create the illusion of being cut-off from home, from who the self really is. There is little peace to be found in not knowing who we really are.
What helps to define my own life and its path is my firm belief that there is a path, that there is the potential of self-transformation. Peace is available. Healing is possible. And that with proper application of will and faith, ending in the release of the personal will through surrender, I may unburden myself of the self-created suffering.
In short, there is
work to do and I have faith that I am eminently capable of it, and through it I may drop these illusory notions of self that seem to imprison me and separate me from genuine joy.
The pain of being alive can be so bright sometimes. My heart goes out to you, Avocado. May you find rest and peace in the middle of your storms. Love/Light, GLB