(Reader, please note: This is not a small or insignificant question to which there is a short and simple answer. Please commit to a bit more reading time than you might normally devote to online material if you wish a full and complete answer. Thank you. — NDW)
At nearly every spiritual renewal retreat I present, I am asked a question about how a person who has chosen to demonstrate Divinity might do so in the presence of pain. My answer is that pain—both physical and emotional—presents one of the biggest challenges to any human being’s determination to reach Completion of the Agenda of the Soul, and so the answer is also challenging.
Let’s talk about that agenda first, and then we’ll explore how to deal with pain in that context.
In the book The Only Thing That Matters we learn in the first paragraph of the first chapter that “98% of the world’s people are spending 98% of their time on things that don’t matter.” So many people are all about life priorities that have nothing to do with the purpose of life; about their reason for being on the earth.
We are not here to get the guy, get the girl, get the car, get the job, get the spouse, get the kids, get the house, get the better car, get the better job, get the better house, get the better spouse, get the office in the corner, get the name on the door, get the retirement watch, get the cruise tickets, get the sickness, and get the heck out.
Indeed, as I have come to understand it, we are not here for anything having to do with the “physical” as our primary purpose, but for—as our prime purpose—the “metaphysical.” In other words, that which is larger than physical.
It is important to understand that human beings are not merely biological entities or chemical creatures, no different from a dolphin or a whale or a bird in the sky except as to the degree of our complexity. We are not simply a Body and a Mind, but are, in fact, spiritual beings (which I call a Soul) having a Body and a Mind.
The question is, why? Why would a spiritual being—totally free, totally unencumbered, totally unlimited—choose to “physicalize”? Why would we elect to materialize in a world where we would be everything but free, where we would be completely encumbered, and where we would be utterly limited?
Did we do it to get the guy, get the girl, get the car, get the job, get the spouse, get the kids, get the house, get the better car, get the better job, etc., etc.? No. Those are not the purposes of life. Those were never meant to be ends in themselves. They were intended to be some of the means to an end.
Most of us know that. Most of us are perfectly clear that life’s purpose must surely be larger than that; greater than what’s on that list. Then what is it? What is this larger purpose for life?
Well, Conversations with God tell us that we came here with an agenda—what would accurately be called the Agenda of the Soul—that has nothing to do with the desires of the Body or the Mind. Those other goals we list listed have to do almost exclusively with those desires—which is why it was said that 98% of the world’s people are spending 98% of their time on things that don’t matter.
This is not to say that the activities of the Body and the Mind have no place in the living of our life, no place on the Agenda of the Soul. They do. Indeed, that agenda cannot be completed without them. But those activities are tools that are used in the completion of the agenda, they are not the agenda itself. Most people, however, act as if they are. Most people move through life with the above goals as their main day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month, year-to-year objectives. Most people, that is, but the Masters among us.
When we look at the lives of humans, both ancient and contemporary, who have been called “masters,” we see that none of them—not one of them—placed a priority on what occupies the daily lives of so many of us. They lived full, rich, and fulfilling lives, but they appeared to be primarily focused on something much different from everyone around them.
They appeared to be because they were. They were focused on Completion of the Agenda of the Soul. And what is that agenda?
I was told in the Conversations with God dialogue that the purpose of life is to recreate yourself anew in every single golden moment of Now in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever you held about Who You Are.
Of course, if you do not know Who You Are, you cannot possibly step into the next grandest version of the greatest vision of that.
And this is the missing link.
Most people have never been told Who They Are. And of those who have been told, or who have found out all by themselves, most don’t believe it. And of those who believe it, most nevertheless do not live into it. That is, they do not demonstrate it. They hold it as a concept only, but not as a moment-to-moment expression and experience.
Conversations with God tells us that Who We Are is an aspect of Divinty. We are to God as a drop of water is to the ocean. We are each an Individuation of The All. And we have come to physicality to experience that.
Yes, I am saying that as I understand it, the Soul has come to physicality in order to express and experience Divinity. And the circumstances, events, and activities of our life are meant to be used as tools with which to accomplish that.
Some of these circumstances, events, and activities are self-created and personally initiated (a particular career choice, a specific diet choice, a life partnership choice, and disciplines such as yoga, meditation, chant, mantra, ritual, prayer, and fasting are examples) and some are life-produced or other-person initiated (natural disasters, accidents, health conditions, employment changes, relationship challenges, and loss of a loved one are some possibilities).
I have also been told that while some circumstances, events, and activities are not self-initiated, all are self-created. That is, we are each involved in a process of joint or collaborative creation of the Exterior Reality in our collective experience, and in the singular or unilateral creation of the Interior Reality of our individual experience. This means that not everything that we encounter in life is created personally by us. Some of it–a great deal of it–is a co-creation by The Collective known as humanity. As part of that Collective, we are each individually impacted.
We have come to Earth in order that we may use our collective and individual creations to have an opportunity to express and experience our True Identity. Such an experience is available to us only in a realm where Relativity exists (such as the physical realm), as opposed to a realm of the Absolute (such as the spiritual realm), because only in the Realm of Relativity is an complete experience and an expression of Divinity possible, inasmuch as the Realm of the Absolute contains nothing but Divinity in one form: What you and I would call, in human terms, Love.
(You cannot experience being The Light if there is nothing but light always and forever. You can know yourself as The Light, but to have an experience of yourself as that, you must place yourself where there is no light at least some of the time. For, as CWG tells us, “in the absence of that which You Are Not, that which You Are is not.” That is, it is not experienceable.)
(NOTE: For a wonderful description of the entire process of life, its meaning, its purpose, and how it interlinks with what we call “life after death,” please read HOME WITH GOD in a Life That Never Ends. For much more on the subject of Exterior and Interior Reality and a remarkable explanation of the Realm of the Spiritual, the Realm of the Physical, and the Realm of Pure Being, please read When Everything Changes, Change Everything. And finally, for a startlingly clear articulation of the Agenda of the Soul as it relates to all of this, please read The Only Thing That Matters. These three books, read in tandem in that order, will introduce you to a spiritual cosmology that will change your whole point of view about life and why you are living it. This, in turn, will change the way you are living it. And that, in its turn, will change you. Should more than a few of us make this change, it would change the world.)
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The above is a very abbreviated articulation of the Agenda of the Soul. As was just noted, a deep reading of the three books recommended above will provide a much richer context within which to consider the question at hand. This much-shortened overview has been offered here simply to create a context within my commentary on the topic of pain may be embraced.
I’ll begin by inviting us all to notice that “pain” is not the same as “suffering.” In most cases and for most people most of the time it does involve “suffering,” because the experience of pain is unpleasant and unwelcome.
CWG tell us that “pain” is an objective physical or emotional experience. Suffering arises out of our decision about it. When we suffer from the pain we are experiencing, it is an announcement from us that the pain is unacceptable; that, in essence, something is happening that we wish were not happening, or that should not be occurring.
Pain that is acceptable (many women experience this in childbirth, some actually finding joy in the pain; many people experience this in a dentist’s chair, some actually finding relief in the pain) can often be experienced without suffering—or certainly with reduced suffering. That is, we find it tolerable.
Pain that is unacceptable is often found to be intolerable. Or, to use a word that is more on-the-mark: insufferable.
The antidote, then, to insufferable pain is acceptability. That’s the RX. That’s the pill. That’s the medicine. And that’s where spirituality comes in.
Spirituality can make the unacceptable acceptable by opening our Mind to the wisdom of our Soul.
Please be clear that life will never make sense to your Mind. If you try to figure it out with your Mind and your Mind alone, it will rarely make sense to you. You will rarely experience peace. Certainly not the “peace that passeth all understanding.”
This is because your Mind is working with extremely limited and often inaccurate data—the information it has collected about life since the inception of its current functioning. The Soul, on the other hand, holds an awareness of What Is So (and has been, and will be) through Eternity.
When we use our Mind to access this level of awareness, the incomprehensible becomes understandable, and yes, the unacceptable can become acceptable. (For some suggestions on how to access the Soul, go to http://www.thewaytothesoul.net)
Let me offer you a striking example. Normally we would run away from danger. Yet there are times when even rationally thinking people actually run toward danger. This can happen when we have thought it through thoroughly (as in a person who enlists in the army or in a movement that poses danger), and it can happen spontaneously, without us thinking about it (as in a person who runs into the burning building to save a crying baby).
In either case, the decision to step into danger arises out of a belief that the person holds. And belief is just a two-syllable word for what we hold to be most sacredly true. In some circles this is called our spirituality.
Our ability to endure pain without abject suffering is increased when something we believe about the pain makes the pain itself acceptable. Even, perhaps, welcome. (And a woman in childbirth or a man in a dentist’s chair are not the only examples of this that we can easily think of.)
In every case when we encounter the experience of pain in our life, we are invited to answer a fundamental question: Who am I in relationship to this event or experience? Indeed, this is the central question of all of life. To be sure, we’ve placed ourselves into physicality in order to confront the question and experience the answer.
As we move closer and closer to mastery in living, we see and recognize that what is called humanity’s “basic instinct” is not survival, it is the expression of Divinity. That is why we run into the burning building to save the child, and not away from it.
Our life priorities change dramatically in such moments, because we are coming from our Soul and not from our Mind. We are coming from Love and not from Fear. We are coming from Who We Really Are and not from who we have imagined ourselves to be.
Look to see, then, in the moment you are experiencing pain (physical or emotional) what aspect of your Divinity it is producing the opportunity for you to experience. How would you experience yourself if you thought this was a Burning Building Moment?
Of course, in the case of the burning building, we have a reason to be willing to experience pain. What would be the reason for mitigating pain at other times, when the life or endangerment of another is not at stake? What “higher purpose” can be called forth to offset the feeling of “unwelcome-ness” regarding the pain?
I am going to suggest that the reason would be the same as that considered by a woman in childbirth. The creation of new life. In this case, a new life for our very Self; a birthing of Who We Really Are. And new lives, as well, for everyone who has or had a role in the pain we are experiencing.
Every moment is the moment of our New Birth, whatever that moment holds. This is, in truth, what is meant by being born again. We are—from second-to-second, minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour, and day-to-day—recreating ourselves anew. And everything within our Contextual Field is providing us the tools with which to do that.
Now, does that mean that we are required to experience pain in order to experience Divinity? Fair question. And the answer is no, we do not. Nothing is specifically required in order for us to experience our True Identity. (See Communion with God, the Fifth Illusion of Humans: Requirement Exists.)
Yet while nothing is required, some things are voluntarily and consciously or unconsciously produced–collaboratively generated or individually initiated–within the Contextual Field that is physical life. We are required to do none of this, and as we evolve as a species we realize that, and thus begin to make different choices as a means of expressing and experiencing Who We Are. We are not at that stage yet in the evolution of humanity.
Our species is extraordinarily young. A lot of people like to think of humans as highly evolved. In fact, humanity has just emerged from its infancy on this planet. In their book New World New Mind, Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich placed this in perspective in one mind-boggling paragraph:
Suppose Earth’s history were charted on a single year’s calendar, with midnight January 1 representing the origin of the Earth and midnight December 31 the present. Then each day of Earth’s “year” would represent 12 million years of actual history. On that scale, the first form of life, a simple bacterium, would arise sometime in February. More complex life-forms, however, come much later; the first fishes appear around November 20. The dinosaurs arrive around December 10 and disappear on Christmas Day. The first of our ancestors recognizable as human would not show up until the afternoon of December 31. Homo sapiens—our species—would emerge at around 11:45 pm…and all that has happened in recorded history would occur in the final minute of the year.
So we see that we are the infants of the Universe. We have not yet all learned about the mechanics of life–much less its primary purpose. We live in a Contextual Field, but we do not yet know that the Contextual Field is a manifestation of what CWG calls The Law of Opposites. It places within our ability to encounter, that which is “other than” Who We Are, so that Who We Are may be expressed in relationship to it, and thus known experientially.
As we evolve, individually and as a species, we come to understand that so-called negative elements of the Contextual Field do not have to placed “in our own backyard.” They do not have to be part of our present experience. They can be distant experience, or remembered experience. It is for this reason that the Universe is unfathomably huge. It is a container sufficiently large to hold the Sum Total of All Experiences, without necessarily having them be part of any sentient being’s personal, direct, here-and-now encounter with life.
Highly Evolved Beings (abbreviated as HEB’s in the discussion found in CWG-Book 3) understand this, and thus use their awareness of all that exists in the Universe, and their remembrance of all that has existed in what we would call their collective past, to form the Context within which they presently experience and co-create their identity.
While we are still evolving as a species to that level, humans tend to use more extreme and dramatic means with which to achieve the same ends. In this, we are indeed much like children who so often seem to have to “learn the hard way.”
Of course we are, in the strictest sense, learning nothing, but merely remembering Who We Really Are. (But that’s a subject for another whole essay.) So we see, then, how and why we get into our “drama” during this life, and we see why and how members of our species have created and produced so much unnecessary pain for themselves and for each other.
Wars, violence, suffering, poverty, insufficiency, and even our own bad health and premature death are caused in large measure by the immature choices of an immature species.
There is another side to this as well. Pain is often freely chosen by individuals of unusually high consciousness as a means of loving service to another. We have already used the example of childbirth several times, and—as we noted earlier—that is far from the only example we can think of where this may be true.
In such a case, pain is not the Law of Opposites asserting itself for the benefit of the person experiencing it, but the free will choice of a Divine Being demonstrating its Divinity for the benefit of another. (This was precisely the case at the crucifixtion of Jesus , and has also been true for countless others—the person running into the burning building and many, many more—through the ages of humanity.) So the immaturity of the humanity is not an affliction of condition of every person who has ever lived or is living now. But it has been and still is the prevailing condition among the largest number of us.
Yet now, more and more humans are every day awakening. Many are choosing to end the pain of others, even if it means experiencing pain themselves. And they are choosing to see all the pain they have ever experienced as a gift from life, allowing them to notice and declare Who They Really Are.
A decision to recontextualize the physical or emotional pain we are experiencing in this way can transmogrify the pain itself.
(Definition…Transmogrify: To transform, especially in a surprising or magical manner.)
This may not make the pain go away, but it could alter our experience of the pain dramatically.
Now let me end this essay by offering you a tool that can be more powerful in re-contextualizing—and thus, transmogrifying—pain than you might ever have imagined possible.
The tool is Gratitude.
Gratitude for everything can change anything.
Remember that always. Gratitude for everything can change anything.
Even pain.
Gratitude is an announcement that nothing is happening to us that should not be happening, because everything that is happening to us is happening through us at some level, or it would not and could not be happening. It is an announcement of Who We Are, and a clarion declaration of appreciation to The Source of All that made us this way.
Gratitude stops us from opposing and starts us composing—as in, “Compose yourself.” It is the ultimate expression of acceptance. It places into practical application the CWG wisdom: “What you resist persists, and what you look at disappears. That is, it ceases to have its illusory form.”
When we stop resisting pain (or anything else in our life), we shift the energy with which we are confronting it, and that switch alone can have a remarkably positive effect—not only on our attitude (which is a powerful aspect of the creation of our Interior Reality), but on the Exterior Reality as well.
It is a fundamental law of the Universe that Energy Affects Energy. It is circular, recreating itself in the form in which it is expressed. You can easily see how this ties into the only purpose of human life: to recreate yourself anew in every single golden moment of Now in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever you held about Who You Are.
Because energy affects energy in a way that replicates itself, gratitude for every situation, circumstance, or event in your life showers their energy with positive energy, which in turn affects their energy in a positive way.
And finally, it is important to note that “a positive way” does not necessarily mean that the situation, circumstance, or event disappears, but it does mean that the situation, circumstance, or event can change in terms of the affect it has on your Interior Reality.
I knew a man who felt so blessed by his illness that, with his attitude about it, he blessed all those whose lives he touched—not only while he was experiencing it, but long after he left his physical form because of it.
And so we see the wisdom of the wonderful insight offered by spiritual messenger Da Free John when he said, “Cease all againstness.” As well, by author and teacher Byron Katie in her remarkably healing gook, Loving What Is.
My wish for you is that you will never be in severe pain. Yet if you are, I wish that you may have the presence of Mind and the unification of Mind and Soul to be able to experience the pain without deep suffering. Ask the God of your understanding for help in that moment. I believe you will receive it, and receive it in abundance.
Lovingly shared………neale.
A Spiritual Response to Pain 