Between Pain and Joy: the Pendulum
How is it possible that there is so much pain in the world?
The pendulum can’t stay all the time in the area of joy or happiness. This is simply because things are not designed like that in the universe. It’s only natural that it shifts to the center at some point, and also then to extreme pain and back to pleasure. Our existence, as well as that of everything created, is spent in a continuum going from joy to pain, but it’s precisely this that our artificial identity isn’t willing to accept. It rejects this part of the story and struggles to death against it. This is so because our rational mind has been programmed to avoid pain and resorts through every conceivable strategy to resist the natural movement of the pendulum. This resistance only delays the course of the oscillation, which sometimes, on its way to extreme pain, remains fixed at the pain side during a longer time than necessary-which is precisely what we are trying to avoid. Thus, the resonance of what we have been so used to feeling-suffering-is actually a direct result of the resistance to pain, which is then perpetuated within us. The pendulum needs to complete its cycle before going back to the center. The longer we resist its natural flow, the longer we will remain on the side that “feels bad.” This is why suffering is more familiar to us than joy. Unconsciously, we exhaust good feelings very quickly, while we resist unendingly the unpleasant ones. The resonance of perpetuated suffering or pain will go on until we finally let ourselves experience it, embracing it just as it is. This state of affairs does not mean that we are going to like what will then happen or agree with it. This step is the consequence of a process of taking responsibility for one’s own life and accepting what it demands of us. For many people, that acceptance takes place when the artificial identity we call self-image is weakened, and gets tired of resisting reality and fighting against it. In other cases, acceptance emerges as a consequence of making friends with life and becoming aware that the pendulum’s oscillation is a natural process.
Finally, we come to the realization that we don’t always want to live on the positive side any longer, because we have come to know that this delusion produces even more suffering. We understand that the oscillation is a natural part of our existence as human beings, and the more we accept it, the quicker the pendulum moves.
Adapted from Memory in the Cells
www.cellularmemory.org
