Pain

Be brief; for it is with words or with sunbeams – the more condensed the deeper they burn.  Southey Notes 4:7

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in finding new landscapes but it having new eyes.  Marcel Proust

 

Gibran, “Pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses our understanding."
  
In this brief statement we can understand the purpose of pain. Pain without purpose creates psychological and spiritual suffering. The irony is that we can choose what our pain means to us. Most of the time we do not choose pain or painful experiences. We can choose what the pain means and we can choose how we deal with the pain.

Gibran goes on to say that pain is very much part of nature and life. But if we could be observers of our pain, our pain would not seem less wondrous than our joy. (From Kahlil Gibran, the Prophet)

There is always purpose to our pain.

The pain of all pain is when we have no purpose in our existence, when we are alive but find no purpose in that life.  This is a spiritual pain – the irony of this pain is that is comes mainly from “nothing happening” to us. We call this neglect.  Neglect is the most insidious kind of pain and abuse. Nothing happened, but it should have. The brain is not equipped to deal with nothing, so it makes nothing (neglect) into something, and that something manifests itself biologically in the brain, as largeholes, and psychologically as “I must have no value.”  This creates a spiritual pain of having no purpose while still alive. While this is not true, this level of consciousness creates such suffering for the person who holds it. 

Neglect is the withholding of love and validation. So it is quite easy to conclude that, “I’m unworthy and undeserving of being loved.”

Note:  (The brain is wired neurologically because of stimulation from environment.)  The brain wires everything even the nothingness of things – wires all data, accurate and inaccurate.

The brain in its capacity is infinitely complex, so much in fact that it cannot possibly comprehend itself.  However, it knows exactly how it functions in relationship to everything else. The brain/mind can comprehend many things, and by its very nature wants to comprehend all things. By the way, that is what we call God, “all knowing, all comprehending.”  It is not something we can know cognitively (psychologically); it is however, something we can sense (heart & brain combined).

Nick Hanson, PhD, and Richard Mendius, MD, in their book, “Buddha’s Brain,” state “The number of possible combinations of 100 billion neurons firing or not, is approximately 10 to the millionth power, or 1 followed by a million zeros; in principle, this is the number of possible states of your brain. To put this quantity in perspective, the number of atoms in the universe is estimated to be ‘only’ about 10 to the eighteenth power.”

Thinking about that, how much of our “brain power” do we really use?  How much of our brain power is actually wasted over things that are so unimportant, to the healing of the self and the planet?  How much brain power do we use in worry about things that we do nothing about?