Muddle's Waters IV

[MuddleThrough]

Yes, it all comes down to balance in the end. I think it's important not to look at things on just one plane, but to look at the whole picture and care for your entire being in a balanced way. If you do nothing but avoid emotional pain it is likely that you will be in dire straights before too long because you will have failed to make adult decisions or take prudent action because doing so is an act of resistance, using Chodrin's model - causing pain (I think she actually became violent with her husband when he told her he was cheating on her, if I remember correctly - shocking if you've ever seen her or heard her talk). I don't advocate accepting anything your spouse might do or accepting anything less than what you judge to be acceptable grounds for a renewed relationship just to put yourself through a spiritual test. As you point out in your analogy, there's always a positive to focus on in any situation if you are so inclined, but proactively choosing to put yourself in healthy situations is far better for you than using PMA as a reactive defense mechanism. I think we have all, for our own reasons, have made the decision to stick it out. The best way to cope with a less than desireable situation is to find value and meaning in the experience and in so doing not acknowledge the pain or the cause of the pain.

I make a distinction between hope and a rigid worldview. I think you can hope for something without expectation - and in so doing not experience dissapointment when you don't get what you are hoping for. It's a risky game, because hoping does become a bit of an investment. I find that fixing that hope to something more abstract is a healthier way of doing this, because instead of finding faults in the details of what you get, you are better able to fit what you actually receive into the abstract thing you hoped for than the specific. When you try and control your world and your position in it by creating a rigid structure for how people *should* act and judge them, you create first a lot of pain in yourself because people don't act the way you think they should because you are too subjective to know what that objective should really looks like. Secondly, you judge yourself equally harshly when you judge others (because you are really judging the portion of yourself that is reflecting the actions of another) and you hurt because you recognize that you don't live up to your standards of what people should do either. This is painful. I think it's possible to accept that you don't know what the universe should be like, you can only experience how it is and still hope things will turn out good for you in whatever area of your life you are hoping for change in. I don't think this causes pain.

The concept of the gateless gate resonates with me here. It's basically about achieving enlightenment, and how once this has been done you realize that you had it all along (but I am going to apply it to happiness rather than enlightenment). Passing through a gate into a different state, turning around and realizing the boundary is not really there - nothing separates you from where you were before. The attachment of happiness to a material object (or a spiritual one for that matter) always makes your happiness contingent on something and puts it just out of reach. The truth is that it is always there, and the hint that you got that happiness can be gained through that object or the possession of it is actually happiness in the moment, and it was experienced without the satisfactiong of the anticipation of possessing that object. And all too often, when you finally do get what you thought would bring you happiness, you're let down. If you can accept that you are happy, that you possess the ability to be happy all along, you just focus on it or are aware of it in certain stimulating situations, you can separate it from an external stimulus and look to the true nature of it within the self. It really comes from appreciation and perspective. It's the choice to appreciate something that makes desiring to possess it feel like it will bring happiness. The act of appreciating it is a happy act, the desire to possess the object is a result of our fear of losing that happiness. It eventually kills the feeling of happiness because we are fixating on the fear. If we recognize that we never lose the ability to appreciate, we fear the loss of happiness less because that happiness is always with us. Overcoming our fear is ultimately what allows us to live meaningful lives. A person consumed with fear is generally a pretty unhappy, unhealthy person because they always put their happiness on the other side of their fears. They are constantly trying to work through fear, to banish it and rid themselves of it, yet they are making it a bigger part of their being. They are amplifying its significance because they are focusing on it. Within this is the choice to hand all of their personal power to fear by waging war with it.

I've read somewhere about the difference between people who are motivated to succeed and those who would rather avoid failure. The difference is profound in their consciousness because or what they use to motivate them. Which personality type do you really think is happier?