While you are in the physical dimension and bound to the collective human mind, physical pain is still possible. This should not be confused with suffering, with mental-emotional pain. All suffering is created by the ego and is due to resistance. While you are in this dimension, you are still subject to its cyclical nature and to the law of impermanence of all things, but you no longer perceive this as "bad". It simply is.
By allowing the "BEING" of all things, a deeper dimension is revealed to him under the play of opposites, as a permanent presence, a deep stillness that does not change, a joy without cause that is beyond good and evil . This is the joy of Being, the peace of Divinity.
At the level of form, there is birth and death, creation and destruction, growth and dissolution of apparently separate forms. This is reflected everywhere: in the life cycle of a star or a planet, in a physical body, a tree, a flower, in the rise and fall of nations, political systems, civilizations; and in the inevitable cycles of gain and loss of an individual's life.
There are success cycles; when things come to you and prosper. And failure cycles; when they retire or disintegrate and you have to let them go to make room for new things to emerge, or for the transformation to happen. If you cling and resist at this point, it means that you are refusing to follow the flow of life, and you will suffer. It is not true that the ascending cycle is good and the descending bad, except in the judgment of the mind.
Growth is usually considered positive, but nothing can grow forever. If growth, of any kind, continued forever, it would eventually become monstrous and destructive. The solution is needed so that new growth can occur.
One can not exist without the other. The descending cycle is absolutely essential for spiritual realization. You must have failed deeply at some level or experienced a loss or deep pain to be brought to the spiritual dimension.
Or perhaps the same success became empty and meaningless and thus proved a failure. Failure hides in every success and success in every failure. In this world, which will remain at the level of form, people "fail" sooner or later, of course, and each achievement eventually becomes nothing. All forms are impermanent.
You can still be active and enjoy creating new forms and circumstances, but you will not identify with them. You do not need them to get a sense of yourself. They are not your life, only your life situation. Your physical energy is also subject to cycles. It can not always be at a stop.
There will be times of low energy, as well as others of high energy. There will be periods in which you are very active and creative, but there may also be others in which everything seems to be stagnant, when it seems that you do not get anywhere, you do not achieve anything. A cycle can last from a few hours to several years.
There are great cycles and short cycles within the long ones. Many diseases are produced by fighting against low energy cycles, which are vital for regeneration. The compulsion to act and the tendency to derive your sense of own value and the identity of external factors such as success is an inevitable illusion as long as you are identified with the mind.
This makes it difficult or impossible for you to accept the low cycles and allow them to be. Thus, the intelligence of the organism can take control as a self-protective measure and produce a disease to force it to stop, so that the necessary regeneration can take place.
The cyclical nature of the universe is closely linked to the impermanence of all things and situations. The Buddha made this a central part of his teaching. All conditions are highly unstable and are in constant flux, or, as he put it, "Impermanence is a characteristic of every condition, of every situation that you can face in your life. They will change, disappear or they will no longer satisfy you. "
Impermanence is also fundamental in the thought of Jesus: "Do not keep treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume them and where thieves enter and steal ..." As long as a condition is considered "good" by the mind, Be it a relationship, a possession, a social role, a place or your physical body, the mind becomes attached to it and identifies with it.
It makes you happy, makes you feel good about yourself and can be part of what you are, or what you think it is. But nothing lasts in this dimension where the moth and the rust are consumed. Either it ends, or it changes, or it undergoes a polarity change: the same condition that was good yesterday or last year, has suddenly become bad or gradually. The same condition that made him happy, then makes him unhappy.
The prosperity of today becomes the empty consumerism of tomorrow. Happy marriage and honeymoon become divorce or unhappy coexistence. Or the condition disappears, so its absence makes it unhappy.
When a condition or situation to which the mind has become attached and with which it has been identified, changes or disappears, the mind can not accept it. It will cling to the condition that disappears and resist the change.
It's almost as if a member of the body was torn off. Sometimes we hear that people who have lost all their money or whose reputation has been ruined commit suicide. These are extreme cases. Others, when they have a great loss of one kind or another, simply become deeply unhappy or hurt themselves. They can not distinguish between their life and their life situation.
The Buddha taught that even happiness is dukkha, a Pali word meaning "suffering" or "dissatisfaction." It is inseparable from its opposite. This means that your happiness and unhappiness are in fact one thing. Only the illusion of time separates them.
This is not being negative. It is simply recognizing the nature of things, so that you do not pursue an illusion for the rest of your life. Nor is it to say that you should not appreciate things or conditions pleasant or beautiful.
But to look for something in them that they can not give an identity, a sense of permanence and fulfillment is a recipe for frustration and suffering.
The entire advertising industry and the consumer society would collapse if people became enlightened and stopped looking for their identity through things. The more you seek happiness by this means, the more you will elude it. Nothing outside will satisfy you, except the temporary and superficial, but you may need to experience many disappointments before you realize this truth.
Things and external conditions can give you pleasure, but they can not give you joy. Nothing can give you joy. Joy has no cause and arises from within as joy of Being.
It is an essential part of the inner state of peace, the state that has been called the peace of God. It is your natural state, not something that you have to work hard for or have to strive to achieve.
Many people never realize that there can be no "salvation" in anything they do, possess or achieve. Those who realize this often tire of the world and become depressed: if nothing can give you true fulfillment, what is left to fight for it? What's the point?
The Old Testament prophet must have come to such an understanding when he wrote: "I have seen everything that has been done under the sun and everything is vanity and striving against the wind". When you reach this point, you are one step away from despair and one step away from enlightenment.
A Buddhist monk once told me: "Everything I have learned in the twenty years that I have been a monk can be summed up in one sentence: everything that emerges vanishes. That's what I know".
What I wanted to say, of course, was this: I have learned not to resist what it is; I have learned to let be present and to accept the impermanent nature of all things and conditions.
That's how I found peace. Not offering resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, calmness and lightness. That state no longer depends on whether things are good or bad. It seems almost paradoxical, however, that when their internal dependence on forms has disappeared (when there is no longer attachment to things or people), the general conditions of your life, the external forms, tend to improve greatly.
The things, people or conditions that you thought you needed for happiness now come to you effortlessly on your part and you are free to enjoy and appreciate them, while they last.
All those things, of course, will go away, the cycles will go and they will come, but once the dependency has disappeared, there is no fear of loss.
Life flows easily. The happiness that comes from a secondary source is never very deep. It's just a pale Re ...