Forget Feeling Good All the Time

          When Liz here was first a student of A Course in Miracles she was an anxious person and looking for a way out of fear. In fact, her introduction to it was Jerry Jampolsky’s Love is Letting Go of Fear, the title a quote from the Course and very appealing to her. She dove right into the Course, all three books at once. I don’t remember how long it took her to read the Text, but as she neared the end she kept waiting for it to “wrap things up” into a nice package that would summarize all she read into the formula that would reveal the way into enlightenment and therefore out of fear. But instead it ended on Choose Once Again. How disappointing! What had she missed? She was being told the way out, but it wasn’t enough for her.

The Buddhists say, referring to ego, “Life is suffering.” But they also say, “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.” The Course deals with the suffering aspect of ego, which is a choice. Painful things will happen. Suffering over them is a choice. And what leads to suffering is resistance to pain.

For ten years or so nonduality teachings have exploded on social media. I’ve watched Course students go running for what they hope will be the fix for their pain because it has turned out the Course teaches them how to go past pain, not avoid it. Of course, nothing can. But in hope, they run from teacher to teacher on YouTube for a while, getting that endorphin bump when a new teacher says something that zings them for a moment. But then that, too, fades, pain shows up in its usual forms, and they must move on to the next one. They’re chasing the hormones in their brain like a drug, hoping for the teacher or teaching that will tell them how to feel good all the time. They think this is what enlightenment is. It is not. Ego does not change when enlightenment shows up. And even if ego falls away, you still must live with a psyche or body or brain or whatever it is that holds ego’s momentum and conditioning. And in any case, you must also live with ego in others. Ego winding down takes a long time. You may not reach a state of feeling good all the time. What you do reach is a state where it does not matter how the person feels.

Pain does not have a given purpose. It is the state of ego, which is a false sense of existence masquerading as reality. But you can use pain (physical, psychological, emotional) to remind you to turn to truth—God, love, peace, happiness, whatever you want to call it. That is here in consciousness beyond ego, beyond pain. You can choose it over the pain.

Accepting pain does not mean you like it. It means you do not resist it. You can also accept that you do not like pain! Accepting pain does not mean indulging in it, either. It means acknowledging it, and if possible, doing what you can in a healthy way to mitigate it, and then turning away from it toward truth. “This is not truth. I’ll use it to remind me to turn to truth.”

Without stories of guilt and punishment or victimhood, physical pain becomes just a sensation—an unpleasant sensation but not suffering. Much psychological and emotional pain is due to loss of some kind, so what you feel is grief. Grief is a healing process, ending in acceptance of the loss and understanding how it fits into your lief, when you allow it and go through it.

What many fear when facing pain is that they will be swamped; that they will not be able to handle it. But they do handle it. The issue is never bigger than they are, it only seems that way before it is faced. The more you face pain, the less afraid of pain you become. You may always initially flinch, but then you know you can handle it, especially if you use it to remind you to turn to truth. Then you not only handle it, but you know you are never alone with it.

Many that I hear from express experiences that reveal to me the truth is here in their conscious awareness. And then they express the “but” – “But I still judge!” “But I’m still upset when my kids are not happy!” “But I still don’t like wars!” So? They have what they have been seeking. It does not matter that ego is still here in its pain. It is ego that thinks that ego continuing to appear when truth is here is significant. There is no “but”. It is an “and”: Truth is here and ego continues to appear. Shrug.

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