You will have rest when you transform pain back into a normal experience.
Nonduality and enlightenment are often described as entering bliss, completely getting away from pain, never having a problem again in your life. That’s a misinterpretation of something that’s very subtle, but once you get it, it will totally jump start your search.
All these ways we’ve misinterpreted enlightenment teachings are making us miserable. Trying to get rid of misery is the number one guaranteed way to make yourself miserable!
The real difference is how you hold yourself against pain.
Pain happens. Our tendency is to hold ourselves in tension through the pain. To try to get away from it. The tenseness makes it worse and enhances whatever’s going on. Trying to achieve full total bliss is terrible advice for life! It’s a trap.
You’ll be free when you see pain as normal. When you see it as normal as you see happiness. When you see pain as normal as boredom.
This will transform our lives and the way we relate with each other and contribute to the world. As it is, we constantly hold ourselves against pain, and fall headlong towards promises of happiness. It becomes a constant need to take more and more, consuming all the good things we can find and running from the bad. It’s an compulsion to achieve an elusive happiness, a thing that can never be held on to.
What really happens in awakening is you realize that you’re just you. And you realize that reality is reality and illusion is illusion. When you step into that you stop trying to manipulate the world to suit you.
We become participating creatures relating to what’s around us, rather than avoiding anything.
If you don’t see pain as a normal experience, you’re going to constantly try to avoid it, right? You’re going to end up making it tons worse.
This is where we are as a world. We’re caught in this endless cycle of trying to get rid of pain and making pain worse. Trying to get rid of anger and making anger worse. Trying to get rid of anything negative which captures us in a mind tornado of illusion.
What’s more important is discovering who are you, and what is real.
You can absolutely experience that this very moment. The easiest way is to quickly look inside.
If you look inside right now, you will not see pain. You will not see anger in there. You will not see happiness in there. There’s really nothing at all.
We’re just all a field through which we live life. We are simply real human beings. We are each a person. This is what we’re really looking for to transform life, this relaxed ordinariness where pain is a normal thing.
Anger is a normal thing. It’ll go away so much faster if you see it as normal. Then it turns into something useful rather than something destructive.
Clinging to constant excited happiness very un-useful. That’s the path of illusion.
If there’s anything the human being has been evolved to be, it’s to be a useful creature. Hold that as your reality of life, your usefulness. Then it becomes obvious how much you belong here, who you are.
Take a look. Who are you?