Between Pain and Joy: the Pendulum
by Luis Angel Diaz
Our existence is like a pendulum oscillating between comfortable and uncomfortable states, or, to put it simpler, between pain and joy. To understand this concept in a practical way, we should be open to experience ourselves as “energy skeins.” The vital force forming and animating us is very subtle and its state changes continuously. For several decades now, scientists have shared the view that matter and energy are the same thing and, consequently, all is energy and all vibrates within us in a given frequency.
If we apply to emotional states the concept of opposite and complementary energies, we find extreme pain and displeasure on the one side, and extreme joy and pleasure on the other. It’s not likely that we can know much about pleasure without having previously experienced displeasure-in other words, something that made us feel uncomfortable or prevented us from feeling pleasure. Only when we have known pain can we experience its opposite and feel how comfortable or peaceful we are in a given situation or with a given person. The lack of what was pleasant allows us to know, by contrast, how much we wish to have that which made us feel well. For example, we walk every day without ever realizing that we do, or how we do it, until a pebble slides itself into our shoe or we hurt our foot. If our human existence was like that of the rest of the animals on the planet, flowing naturally between the energy opposites of that which feels comfortable or “good” and that which feels uncomfortable or “bad,” we would live some time in the “pain” area and some time in the “joy” area, while the rest of the time we’d go through all the intermediate points that make up the different gradations between pain and joy.
Things aren’t like that, however, for us. We, civilized human beings, have forgotten how to allow the natural flow of life. Our rational mind is programmed to control or resist this natural cycle through a tangle of beliefs and of mental and emotional habits that make upon artificial energy identity. Theorists have called this aspect of ourselves “ego.” This ego only wants and accepts joy, while avoiding and rejecting pain. Through this cultural conditioning, pain is no longer an energy experience and comes to be associated with fear, complaint, shame, guilt, frustration, anger, and many other negative feelings. It’s interesting to note that when circumstances are favorable to artificial identity (that is, when everything happens as we wish or as we are programmed to have it happen), we feel intensely happy and believe that this state should be permanent. Energetically speaking, we are totally “given over” and our pendulum shifts to the utmost joy. But when there is an experience that occurs somewhere between pain and joy, we ask ourselves what is wrong. How is it possible that there has been so much pain in my life?
