personalizing pain

life's not always easy or comfortable. this is an unavoidable fact for every being on the planet - none excluded. the egoic mechanism, however, has a particular way of reacting to pain and discomfort that elevates these natural and passing phases of experience to chronic, obsessive issues.

there's one reason for this: ego attaches itself to everything it experiences and derives a sense of identity from it. experiences now mean much more than mere experiences; they become invested with the absolute seriousness of defining who we are. the ego takes pain and makes it personal, and in so doing takes any experience of suffering that would normally be associated with a painful event and magnifies it to an unimaginable degree.

unsatisfactory experiences take on dire significance because they reflect directly upon the sense of self, casting a dark shadow over it. pleasing experiences take on a stressful nature because more and more of them are needed to counteract the negative ones and maintain a satisfying identity. an unhealthy obsession develops on both fronts: an obsession to avoid the negative, and an obsession to retain and amass more of the positive.

the entire approach to life is thrown out of whack and becomes an imbalanced effort to let in only a particular slice of experience. pain and loss are seen as unacceptable; a sign of weakness and failure. they become much more than what they are in reality - simple, natural aspects of life in our universe - and develop into grotesque characterizations fueled by our obsessive, unrealistic need to retain strength and success indefinitely.

that which wasn't a problem, because of our unnatural response to it, becomes the source of a tremendous complication that holds the potential to destabilize our entire experience of life, further and further obscuring the natural state of being experienced during infancy and early childhood (and seemingly at all times by other animals).

this natural state is not devoid of challenging or painful experiences, but it takes them as it does any other experience and moves on, not becoming obsessively fixated upon them (a difference that expressed in words may not seem great but experience-wise is huge). it's so significant that the concept of "suffering" as traditionally employed in prosperous Western societies points almost entirely to the reactions toward perceived negativities and hardly at all to the actual source of the reactions themselves. this means that the larger share of our suffering - that which is psychologically generated - can be eradicated by a simple shift in perspective.

of course, one can't just decide to stop reacting unnaturally to life and hope that such a radical and fundamental change will somehow just come about. there is a specific cause for our difficult relationship to life that must be addressed before a restoration to natural functioning becomes possible, just as a breakdown in any mechanism can always be attributed to identifiable problems with concordant solutions.

the only way to end this problem is to locate the true source of our identity. this truth is not some concept or some far-off possibility. it's what is true right now. it's not merely an interesting thought or an entertaining philosophical distraction to engage an idle mind. making unequivocal contact with our fundamental nature is of profound importance to each and every one of us. nothing could possibly be more relevant.

the counter-growth effect

as one's physical body is incresingly affected by the energy shifts associated with spiritual development (which in itself is characterized by the gradual undoing of the ego), the ego is quick to grab hold of seemingly extraordinary feelings and experiences and interpret them so as to attribute undue importance to itself.

"see?" it says, "that was VERY special. when have you ever felt anything like that? probably no one you know has ever experienced anthing like it." if these words hold sway, spiritual growth is being stunted or reversed in the name of ego inflation.

at certain stages, spiritual progress begins to effect strong changes in one's level of consciousness. this inevitably yields "extraordinary" experiences, which are actually only extraordinary from a previous standpoint and indicate nothing more than growth.

naturally, the ego will claim responsibility for these experiences. if this tactic isn't seen through, one can get lost in the delusion that one is more important than others and plummet back into the ego's gravitational force.

from a spiritual standpoint, it's helpful to remember that one will never be any more or less important than one ever was, or anyone or anything that ever was, is or will be. if notions such as "more," "less," "importance," "deserving," "wining" and "losing" can be put aside, spiritual growth will have much more space in which to operate.