Round three of painful thought patterns-
Why do we have dysfunctional, deep-seated thoughts of fear, pain, anxiety, and trauma that are collected in our memories and genes and triggered by random events, felt viscerally as a debilitating discomfort in our body and sustained as a repetitive cycle in our mind? What purpose do these painful thoughts serve?
What we experience in our consciousness is what is real for us, be it love, peace, and happiness or the dispiriting lineup of fear, anxiety, and trauma. Whether the cause of our suffering is triggered by the memory of our personal experience or is provoked by a dreadful event from the far outside world, we feel the suffering only in our consciousness. So to understand why we suffer from painful thoughts it becomes imperative for us to start with understanding the nature of the Infinite Consciousness.
“Infinite Consciousness – although it is the realm of infinite potential and all things possible to be experienced are contained within it – cannot directly experience objects, thoughts, images, feelings, sensations, and perceptions by itself. If the infinite wants to have finite experience, it must cease being infinite consciousness. It must collapse or contract itself into a finite mind and it is only from that finite mind’s point of view that it can view objective experience.”
Rupert Spira
Let me attempt the same point from a different perspective –
Right now each one of us could have any number of thoughts, visuals, sensations, or perceptions if we want, yet we can direct our attention to only one thing at a time. That is the limitation of our finite mind. Now imagine we had an unlimited mind and were able to think every potential thought there is all at the same time right now. If all thoughts were to appear at the same time, what would that deluge feel like? If all possible images appeared within our field of vision simultaneously, what would that image look like? If every conceivable sound crashed into our eardrums all at once, what would that vibration sound like?
It will be something utterly unimaginable, but my best bet is that the chaos of every possible sound crashing all around us would suddenly sound like silence, every image appearing in our field of vision would look like a colorless, plain screen, and all thoughts materializing in our awareness at this moment simultaneously would feel like absolute emptiness.
That is what Infinite Consciousness is – All, yet nothing.
“Infinite Consciousness has no color, no form, no limits, and therefore, in Infinite Consciousness, there is no manifestation, no world, no objects.
In order to manifest the world within itself, Infinite Consciousness must cease being infinite. It must become finite. It must take the form of each of our minds.
When Infinite Consciousness contracts into each of our finite minds, this apparent contraction of itself into a finite mind is accompanied by a contraction or a diminishing of the happiness, the wholeness, the perfectness, that is inherent within it.
That is why each of our finite minds experiences contracted happiness or suffering. In other words, the experience of suffering is the price consciousness pays for manifestation.
Suffering, which is the absence of happiness or a sense of lack, is an inevitable counterpart of happiness. That is why all separate selves seek happiness above all else.”
Rupert Spira
The divine has to lose its divinity, for there to be a human experience, and because of that compromise, suffering becomes an innate aspect of humanness. But just because suffering is natural within our human experience, it doesn’t mean that it should be sustained, indulged, and abetted, even though that is precisely what we do every time we experience a painful thought.
Whenever I hear any news account with the words ‘children’ and ‘death’ in its title, I instantly feel a hollow drop sensation right beneath my rib cage followed by a flash of all the horrific children-based tragedies of the world reminded to me in a wordless, visual-less montage. Even before I fully register the pain, even before that crippling sensation of dread gets fully established in my system, I try to push it away, repressing it to an abyss inside me where I don’t have to face it.
We avoid the fear, thinking that keeping it at a distance will protect us, yet every time we turn our back on it, we feed the fear and fuel its power. We maintain the suffering in a forever-loop that goes like “difficult thought – suffering – resist the suffering – move on – get triggered again”. Painful thoughts should never be a part of our experience for all it does is sap our life energy and hold us back from an airy, joyful living, yet this is how we live, fatigued by fear and dread while constantly looking over our shoulders for the next trigger.
Is this how we are supposed to live and die? Is this the grand arc of our story? Don’t we, who were born out of Consciousness and who in a way, gave life to Consciousness’ desire to be manifested have a rightful claim to a happy existence? When the experience of suffering itself is born within Consciousness, is its purpose only about robbing us of happiness? If we look at suffering closely, we will realize that this perception simply does not add up.
“Suffering is to the mind what pain is to the body. If you put your hand in the fire, you experience pain. The pain is not a mistake. The pain is the intelligence of the body telling you ‘Take your hand out of the fire’. So pain is working on behalf of your wellbeing. Suffering is exactly the same at the level of the mind.”
Rupert Spira
In the case of those with dissociative identity disorders, whose brains create alters as a defensive mechanism to escape pain, their traumatic memories are seen as pointers to the wounded parts of their psyche that need mending. Similarly, any fear or anxiety we have in our lives is actually a spotlight upon vulnerable parts of ourselves that need healing.
The true purpose of suffering is not to scare us into indulging the cycle and keep it repeating on us, but to face the pain and level with it. If suffering is the counterpart of happiness, then isn’t it also the closest point to happiness?
Suffering is there, not to limit us, but to point us toward happiness. Suffering is telling us to ‘take our hand out of the fire’ because we have frozen ourselves in fear too afraid to move.
Every teacher in the world states that the only way to reconcile with the painful aspects of our lives is to see the truth about them as clearly as possible. They say that if we can get close to the painful aspects of our lives and let them manifest fully, without repressing or avoiding them, there is a promise of transformation awaiting us on the other side. We are worried that if we indulge in our fears, they would explode into a monstrous, full-blown fear that will swallow us whole and become uncontrollable. But have we ever tried to face our painful emotions to see if that is really the truth?
So the next big question is, how do we get close to suffering?
“Behind all hardening and tightening and rigidity of the heart, there’s always fear. But if you touch fear, behind fear there is a soft spot. And if you touch that soft spot, you find the vast blue sky. You find that which is ineffable, ungraspable, and unbiased, that which can support and awaken us at any time.”
Pema Chödrön
(Cont.)
