love/unity experience increases difficulty with fear/seperation

[Diana]

The thing I strive for every time I start getting sucked back into the human drama is detachment, a larger perspective. That is not to say I don't care. No matter how detached I am I still care deeply—which sounds paradoxical, until you bring into the equation a larger perspective. Detached only means that you are not willing to control "it" (in other words, it's acceptance). A way to reach or try to reach this state is to enlarge your mindset to include a more cosmic perspective, or shift focus to something other than that which you are mired in to something more productive and less destructive. I work for myself so this is easy (relatively speaking) for me—if I am feeling badly about something I just go to work on an ongoing project. Action many times processes stuck emotions.

"Bliss" and "fear" are usually extreme emotions. I think this is what is meant by "the middle way"—to not get overly attached to extreme emotions. Bliss may not, in this context, be defined the way we normally imagine it—ecstasy, rapture, euphoria—but rather, a state of balance, acceptance. I'm not sure at all that I can articulate this. Being happy, blissful, involves an individual emotional component; whereas being balanced may include a blissful state but this is not an individual happiness, it is an eternal "rightness." Eternal "rightness" I can compare to the following: You are sick with a flu, or have a disease, or sprain an ankle. While you are in pain from the problem, all kinds of thoughts and feelings insert themselves into your day. But when you are healed from the problem, you just feel "right" again, you feel like you—but you're not even thinking about how you feel like you again because it is the default, original, unbaggaged you. This is not to say that pain has no purpose, only that there is an eternal you (higher self, soul, whatever inadequate human words may apply here) that when reached and connected with feels "right."

As for monks retreating from the world, yeah, I get that. But I wonder how efficacious that is to evolution. It could be avoidance. When you are sequestered away from the world, it's easy to stay centered—throw yourself back into the conflicts here and see how quickly you become unbalanced. However, in an individual's life, I do think it's imperative to have a sanctuary, a retreat from the world that one can return to to renew one's self. By that I mean one's home, or room, or whatever personal space one has, or spending time in nature.