For centirues, spiritual teachings have suggested that realizing consicousness will bring about a blaze of happy radiance that will remove you -- or at least buffer you -- from the pains and stupidities of Earthly life. Or perhaps that blaze will outshine the darkness enough to make it seem insignificant. While this can appear true in the short term, it's definitely not true in the long term. Now there are lots of good reasons why this idea came to be so popular, but right now, let's examine the flaw in this hope.

Here are the steps in my logic:

1. Life -- Being -- is One Thing. Yes, it appears to be a google-zillion things as well, but it's also One Thing.

2. Being is both Absolute and Relative.

3. Relative is all polarities - dark and light, pleasure and pain, etc.

4. You ARE Being. If Being is One Thing, how could this not be so?

5. Therefore, there's no possible way out of pain.

Actually, here's a shorter version of the logic:

1. Nothing is separate from anything else.

2. Therefore you can't separate yourself from pain.

If you let yourself get this truth, it might help you awaken soon.

* * * * *

We can minimize our pain, and we'll be doing that forever. But the hope that we can go beyond minimizing it into somehow transcending or eradicating it is simply impossible. Can you transcend Being? Can you transcend your whole Being self? If you think you can, then you're trying to separate one part of yourself from the rest of yourself and Being. For some, doing this can indeed bring about a temporary delusion of happiness. But it's temporary.

Your hope of ever attaining any state of permanent bliss, happiness, freedom from fear, or any other quality you don't like, is doomed. This is simply because nothing -- including any qualty you can hope for -- is permanent. The good news is, the sooner you face this, the happier you'll be. Living in reality is way easier than living in endless seeking for permanent bliss.

(c) 2009 Ted Strauss

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