Greater clarity on pain and suffering and the need for such catalyst

[rva_jeremy]

I enthusiastically concur with Agua's point about pain:

I found suffering mostly is a state of resistance to pain and not pain itself. We resist because deep down we fear we cannot bear it, for whatever reason.
So we refuse to feel the pain fully and instead only experience a superficial portion of the pain paired with our state of resistamce, and resistance is a very unleasant state.

I'm certain Q'uo has stated just this. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't have sympathy for suffering, because what is the ego we all inhabit but a system of resistances? We can all relate to resistance, so we can all relate to suffering, and the way it focuses us in spite of our resistance.

I also really liked this point you made about pain, Elros:

I meant I saw that there is no end to pain. Any focus you can have upon pain can only miss most of what it is, looking where you yourself need to be looking at.

This is spot on and dovetails precisely with Agua's above point. To focus on pain itself is kind of like focusing on "homework" rather than focusing on the particular lessons that homework is supposed to help you learn. Pain is part of our experiment with separation. It cannot be vacated without losing something of the very reason for experiencing separation in the first place. We don't need to celebrate it, but we certainly cannot reject it.

It is so very tempting to take an abstract, impersonal relation to the function of pain. When we accept that pain is something we cannot escape, but simply part of the experience of separation from the Creator, we can at once see its abstract teleology and have a personal experience of it that grounds us. We can begin to resolve the paradox between the personal and impersonal.

Keep in mind we live in a society that sees happiness and fulfillment as the end-all-be-all goals of life. It is natural that, should we suffer, we would see ourselves as failing to live up to this social ideal. A lot of our suffering comes from an inability to accept ourselves as validly suffering, to see our suffering as a problem to be eradicated. We might do better to see society and its judgments and values as themselves impersonal, instead of trying to depersonalize our own experience, and understand that society is a configuration of consciousness not designed to fully appreciate suffering until such time as it fully accepts all its constituents, i.e. social memory.