Trời sinh voi sinh cỏ, nhưng cỏ không mọc trước miệng voi. (God gives every bird a worm, but he does not throw it into the nest. )Ngạn ngữ Thụy Điển
Người trí dù khoảnh khắc kề cận bậc hiền minh, cũng hiểu ngay lý pháp, như lưỡi nếm vị canh.Kinh Pháp Cú - Kệ số 65
Trực giác của tâm thức là món quà tặng thiêng liêng và bộ óc duy lý là tên đầy tớ trung thành. Chúng ta đã tạo ra một xã hội tôn vinh tên đầy tớ và quên đi món quà tặng. (The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honor the servant and has forgotten the gift.)Albert Einstein
Với kẻ kiên trì thì không có gì là khó, như dòng nước chảy mãi cũng làm mòn tảng đá.Kinh Lời dạy cuối cùng
Nếu bạn nghĩ mình làm được, bạn sẽ làm được. Nhưng nếu bạn nghĩ mình không làm được thì điều đó cũng sẽ trở thành sự thật. (If you think you can, you can. And if you think you can't, you're right.)Mary Kay Ash
Không trên trời, giữa biển, không lánh vào động núi, không chỗ nào trên đời, trốn được quả ác nghiệp.Kinh Pháp cú (Kệ số 127)
Tôi không hóa giải các bất ổn mà hóa giải cách suy nghĩ của mình. Sau đó, các bất ổn sẽ tự chúng được hóa giải. (I do not fix problems. I fix my thinking. Then problems fix themselves.)Louise Hay
Tôi không thể thay đổi hướng gió, nhưng tôi có thể điều chỉnh cánh buồm để luôn đi đến đích. (I can't change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.)Jimmy Dean
Con người sinh ra trần trụi và chết đi cũng không mang theo được gì. Tất cả những giá trị chân thật mà chúng ta có thể có được luôn nằm ngay trong cách mà chúng ta sử dụng thời gian của đời mình.Tủ sách Rộng Mở Tâm Hồn
Hãy sống tốt bất cứ khi nào có thể, và điều đó ai cũng làm được cả.Đức Đạt-lai Lạt-ma XIV

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Thức tỉnh mục đích sống - Chương 6: Vượt thoát

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The beginning of freedom from the pain-body lies first of all in the realization that you have a pain-body. Then, more important, in your ability to stay present enough, alert enough, to notice the pan-body in yourself as a heavy influx of negative emotion when it becomes active. When it is recognized, it can no longer pretend to be you and live and renew itself through you.

It is your conscious Presence that breaks the identification with the pain-body. When you don't identify with it, the pain-body can no longer control your thinking and so cannot renew itself anymore by feeding on your thoughts. The pain-body in most cases does not dissolve immediately, but once you have severed the link between it and your thinking, the pain-body begins to lose energy. Your thinking ceases to be clouded by emotion; your present perceptions are no longer distorted by the past. The energy that was trapped in the pain-body then changes into vibrational frequency and is transmuted into Presence. In this way, the pain-body becomes fuel for consciousness. This is why many of the wisest, most enlightened men and women on our planet once had a heavy pain-body.

Regardless of what you say or do or what face you show to the world, your mental-emotional state cannot be concealed. Every human being emanates an energy field that corresponds to his or her inner state, and most people can sense it, although they may feel someone else's energy emanation only subliminally. That is to say, they don't know that they sense it, yet it determines to a large extent how they feel about and react to that person. Some people are most clearly aware of it when they first meet someone, even before any words are exchanged. A little later, however, words take over the relationship and with words come the roles that most people play. Attention then moves to the realm of mind, and the ability to sense the other person's energy field becomes greatly diminished. Nevertheless, it is still felt on an unconscious level.

When you realize that pain-bodies unconsciously seek more pain, that is to say that they want something bad to happen, you will understand that many traffic accidents are caused by drivers whose pain-bodies are active at the time. When two drivers with active pain-bodies arrive at an intersection at the same time, the likelihood of an accident is many times greater than under normal circumstances. Unconsciously they both want the accident to happen. The role of pain-bodies in traffic accidents is most obvious in the phenomenon called “road rage,” when drivers become physically violent often over a trivial matter such as someone in front of them driving too slowly.

Man acts of violence are committed by “normal” people who temporarily turn into maniacs. All over the world at court proceedings you hear the defense lawyers say, “This is totally out of character,” and the accused, “I don't know what came over me.” To my knowledge so far, no defense lawyer has said to the judge - although the day may not be far off - “This is a case of diminished responsibility. My client's pain-body was activated, and he did not know what he was doing. In fact, he didn't do it. His pain-body did.”

Does this mean that people are not responsible for what they do when possessed by the pain-body? My answer is: How can they be? How can you be responsible when you are unconscious, when you don't know what you are doing? However, in the greater scheme of things, human beings are meant to evolve into conscious beings, and those who don't will suffer the consequences of their unconsciousness. They are out of alignment with the evolutionary impulse of the universe.

And even that is only relatively true. From a higher perspective, it is not possible to be out of alignment with the evolution of the universe, and even human unconsciousness and the suffering it generates is part of that evolution. When you can't stand the endless cycle of suffering anymore, you being to awaken. So the pain-body too has its necessary place in the larger picture.

PRESENCE

A woman in her thirties came to see me. As she greeted me, I could sense the pain behind her polite and superficial smile. She started telling me her story, and within one second her smile changed into a grimace of pain. Then, she began to sob uncontrollably. She said she felt lonely and unfulfilled. There was much anger and sadness. As a child she had been abused by a physically violent father. I saw quickly that her pain was not caused by her present life circumstances but by an extraordinarily heavy pain-body. Her pain-body had become the filter through which she viewed her life situation. She was not yet able to see the link between the emotional pain and her thoughts, being completely identified with both. She could not yet see that she was feeding the pain-body with her thoughts. In other words, she lived with the burden of a deeply unhappy self. At some level, however, she must have realized that her pain originated within herself, that she was a burden to herself. She was ready to awaken, and this is why she had come.

I directed the focus of her attention to what she was feeling inside her body and asked her to sense the emotion directly, instead of through the filter of her unhappy thoughts, her unhappy story. She said she had come expecting me to show her the way out of her unhappiness, not into it. Reluctantly, however, she did what I asked her to do. Tears were rolling down her face, her whole body was shaking. “At this moment, this is what you feel.” I said. “There is nothing you can do about the fact that at this moment this is what you feel. Now, instead of wanting this moment to be different from the way it is, which adds more pain to the pain that is already there, is it possible for you to completely accept that this is what you feel right now?”

She was quiet for a moment. Suddenly she looked impatient, as if she was about to get up, and said angrily, “No, I don't want to accept this.”

“Who is speaking?” I asked her. “You or the unhappiness in you? Can you see that your unhappiness about being unhappy is just another layer of unhappiness?” She became quiet again. “I am not asking you to do anything. All I'm asking is that you find out whether it is possible for you to allow those feelings to be there. In other words, and this may sound strange, if you don't mind being unhappy, what happens to the unhappiness? Don't you want to find out?”

She looked puzzled briefly, and after a minute or so of sitting silently, I suddenly noticed a significant shift in her energy field. She said, “This is weird. I 'm still unhappy, but now there is space around it. It seems to matter less.” This was the first time I heard somebody put it like that: There is space around my unhappiness. That space, of course, comes when there is inner acceptance of whatever you are experiencing in the present moment.

I didn't say much else, allowing her to be with the experience. Later she came to understand that the moment she stopped identifying with the feeling, the old painful emotion that lived in her, the moment she put her attention on it directly without trying to resist it, it could no longer control her thinking and so become mixed up with a mentally constructed story called “The Unhappy Me.” Another dimension had come into her life that transcended her personal past - the dimension of Presence. Since you cannot be unhappy without an unhappy story, this was the end of her unhappiness. It was also the beginning of the end of her pain-body. Emotion in itself is not unhappiness. Only emotion plus an unhappy story is unhappiness.

When our session came to an end, it was fulfilling to know that I had just witnessed the arising of Presence in another human being. The very reason for our existence in human form is to bring that dimension of consciousness into this world. I had also witnessed a diminishment of the pain-body, not through fighting it but through bringing th light of consciousness to it.

A few minutes after my visitor left, a friend arrived to drop something off. As soon as she came into the room she said, “What happened here? The energy feels heavy and murky. It almost makes me feel sick. You need to open the windows, burn some incense.” I explained that I had just witnessed a major release in someone with a very dense pain-body and that what she felt must be some of the energy that was released during our session. My friend, however, didn't want to stay and listen. She wanted to get away as soon as possible.

I opened the windows and went out to have dinner at a small Indian restaurant nearby. What happened there was a clear, further confirmation of what I already know: That on some level, all seemingly individual human pan-bodies are connected. Although the form this particular confirmation took did come as a shock.

THE RETURN OF THE PAIN-BODY

I sat down at a table and ordered a meal. There were a few other guests. At a nearby table, there was a middle-aged man in a wheelchair who was just finishing his meal. He glanced at me once, briefly but intensely. A few minutes passed. Suddenly he became restless, agitated, his body began twitching. The waiter came to take his plate. The man started arguing with him. “The food was no good. It was dreadful.” “Then why did you eat it?” asked the waiter. And that really set him off. He started shouting, became abusive. Vile words were coming out of his mouth; intense, violent hatred filled the room. One could feel that energy entering the cells of one's body looking for something to latch on to. Now he was shouting at the other guests too, but for some strange reason ignoring me completely as I sat in intense Presence. I suspected that the universal human pain-body had come back to tell me, “You thought you defeated me. Look, I'm still here.” I also considered the possibility that the released energy field left behind after our session followed me to the restaurant and attached itself to the one person in whom it found a compatible vibrational frequency, that is to say, a heavy pain-body.

The manager opened the door, “Just leave. Just leave.” The man zoomed out in his electric wheelchair, leaving everyone stunned. One minute later he returned. His pain-body wasn't finished yet. It needed more. He pushed open the door with his wheelchair, shouting obscenities. A waitress tried to stop him from coming in. He put his chair in fast-forward and pinned her against the wall. Other guests jumped up and tried to pull him away. Shouting, screaming, pandemonium.

A little later a policeman arrived, the man became quiet, was asked to leave and not return. The waitress fortunately was not hurt, except for bruises on her legs. When it was all over, the manager came to my table and asked me, half joking but perhaps feeling intuitively that there was some connection, “Did you cause all this?”

THE PAIN-BODY IN CHILDREN

Children's pain-bodies sometimes manifest as moodiness or withdrawal. The child becomes sullen, refuses to interact, and may sit in a corner, hugging a doll or sucking a thumb. They can also manifest as weeping fits or temper tantrums. The child screams, may throw him or herself on the floor, or become destructive. Thwarted wanting can easily trigger the pain-body, and in a developing ego, the force of wanting can be intense. Parents may watch helplessly in incomprehension and disbelief as their little angel becomes transformed within a few seconds into a little monster. “Where does all that unhappiness come from?” they wonder. To a greater or lesser extent, it is the child's share of the collective pain-body of humanity which goes back to the very origin of the human ego.

But the child may also already have taken on pain from his or her parents' pain-bodies, and so the parents may see in the child a reflection of what is also in them. Highly sensitive children are particularly affected by their parents' pain-bodies. Having to witness their parents' insane drama causes almost unbearable emotional pain, and so it is often these sensitive children who grow into adults with heavy pain-bodies. Children are not fooled by parents who try to hide their pain-body from them, who say to each other, “We mustn't fight in front of the children.” This usually means while the parents make polite conversation, the home is pervaded with negative energy. Suppressed pain-bodies are extremely toxic, even more so than openly active ones, and that psychic toxicity is absorbed by the children and contributes to the development of their own pain-body.

Some children learn subliminally about ego and pain-body simply by living with very unconscious parents. A woman whose parents both had strong egos and heavy pain-bodies told me that often when her parents were shouting and screaming at each other, she would look at them and although she loved them, would say to herself, “These people are nuts. How did I ever end up here?” There was already an awareness in her of the insanity of living in such a way. That awareness helped reduce the amount of pain she absorbed from her parents.

Parents often wonder who to deal with their child's pain-body. The primary question is, of course, are they dealing with their own? Do they recognize it within themselves? Are they able to stay present enough when it becomes activated so that they can be aware of the emotion on the feeling level before it gets a chance to turn into thinking and thus into an “unhappy person”?

While the child is having a pain-body attack, there isn't much you can do except to stay present so that you are not drawn into an emotional reaction. The child's pain-body would only feed on it. Pain-bodies can be extremely dramatic. Don't buy into the drama. Don't take it too seriously. If the pain-body was triggered by thwarted wanting, don't give in now to its demands. Otherwise, the child will learn: “The more unhappy I become, the more likely I am to get what I want.” This is a recipe for dysfunction in later life. The pain-body will be frustrated by your nonreaction and may briefly act up even more before it subsides. Fortunately, pain-body episodes in children are usually more short-lived than in adults.

A little while after it has subsided, or perhaps the next day, you can talk to the child about what happened. But don't tell the child about what happened. Ask questions instead. For example: “What was it that came over you yesterday when you wouldn't stop screaming? Do you remember? What did it feel like? Was it a good feeling? That thing that came over you, does it have a name? No? If it had a name, what would it be called? If you could see it, what would it look like? Can you paint a picture of what it would look like? What happened to it when it went away? Did it go to sleep? Do you think it may come back?”

These are just a few suggested questions. All these questions are designed to awaken the witnessing faculty in the child, which is Presence. They will help the child to disidentify from the pain-body. You may also want to talk to the child about your own pain-body using the child's terminology. The next time the child gets taken over by the pain-body, you can say, “It's come back, hasn't it?” Use whatever words the child used when you talk bout it. Direct the child's attention to what it feels like. Let your attitude be one of interest or curiosity rather than one of criticism or condemnation.

It is unlikely that this will stop the pain-body in its tracks, and it may appear that the child will not even be hearing you, yet some awareness will remain in the background of the child's consciousness even while the pain- body is active. After a few times, the awareness will have gown stronger and the pain-body will have weakened. The child is growing in Presence. One day you may find that the child is the one to point out to you that your own pain-body has taken control of you.

UNHAPPINESS

Not all unhappiness is of the pain-body. Some of it is new unhappiness, created whenever you are out of alignment with the present moment, when the Now is denied in one way or another. When you recognize that the present moment is always already the case and therefore inevitable, you can bring an uncompromising inner “yes” to it and so not only create no further unhappiness, but, with inner resistance gone, find yourself empowered by Life itself.

The pain-body's unhappiness is always clearly out of proportion to the apparent cause. In other words, it is an overreaction. This is how it is recognized, although not usually by the sufferer, the person possessed. Someone with a heavy pain-body easily finds reasons for being upset, angry, hurt, sad, or fearful. Relatively insignificant things that someone else would shrug off with a smile or not even notice become the apparent cause of intense unhappiness. They are, of course, not the true cause but only act as a trigger. They bring back to life the old accumulated emotion. The emotion then moves into the head and amplifies and energizes the egoic mind structures.

Pain-body and ego are close relatives. They need each other. The triggering event or situation is then interpreted and reacted to through the screen of a heavily emotional ego. This is to say, its significance becomes completely distorted. you look at the present through the eyes of the emotional past within you. In other words, what you see and experience is not in the event or situation but in you. Or in some cases, it may be there in the event or situation, but you amplify it through your reaction. This reaction, this amplification, is what the pain-body wants and needs, what it feeds on.

For someone possessed by a heavy pain-body, it is often impossible to step outside his or her distorted interpretation, the heavily emotional “story.” The more negative emotion there is in a story, the heavier and more impenetrable it becomes. And so the story is not recognized as such but is taken to be reality. When you are completely trapped in the movement of thought and the accompanying emotion, stepping outside is not possible because you don't even know that there is an outside. You are trapped in your own movie or dream, trapped in your own hell. To you it is reality and no other reality is possible. And as far as you are concerned, your reaction is the only possible reaction.

BREAKING IDENTIFICATION WITH THE PAIN-BODY

A person with a strong, active pain-body has a particular energy emanation that other people perceive as extremely unpleasant. When they meet a person, some people will immediately want to remove themselves or reduce interaction with him or her to a minimum. They feel repulsed by the person's energy field. Others will feel a wave of aggression toward this person, and they will be rude or attack him or her verbally and in some cases, even physically. This means there is something within them that resonates with the other person's pain-body. What they react to so strongly is also in them. It is their own pain-body.

Not surprisingly, people with heavy and frequently active pain-bodies often find themselves in conflict situations. Sometimes, of course they actively provoke them. But at other times, they may not actually do anything. The negativity they emanate is enough to attract hostility and generate conflict. It requires a high degree of Presence to avoid reacting when confronted by someone with such an active pain-body. If you are able to stay present, it sometimes happens that your Presence enables the other person to disidentify from his or her own pain-body ad thus experience the miracle of a sudden awakening. Although the awakening may be short-lived, the awakening process will have become initiated.

One of the first such awakenings that I witnessed happened many years ago. My doorbell rang close to eleven o'clock at night. My neighbor Ethel's anxiety-laden voice came through the intercom. “We need to talk. This is very important. Please let me in.” Ethel was middle-aged, intelligent, and highly educated. She also had a strong ego and a heavy pain-body. She escaped form Nazi Germany when she was an adolescent, and many of her family members perished in the concentration camps.

Ethel sat down on my sofa, agitated, her hands trembling. She took letters and documents out of the file she carried with her and spread them out all over the sofa and floor. At once I had the strange sensation as if a dimmer switch had turned the inside of my entire body to maximum power. There was nothing to do other than remain open, alert, intensely present - present with every cell of the body. I looked at her with no thought and no judgment and listened in stillness without any mental commentary. A torrent of words came out of her mouth. “They sent me another disturbing letter today. They are conducting a vendetta against me. You must help. We need to fight them together. Their crooked lawyers will stop at nothing. I will lose my home. They are threatening me with dispossession.”

It transpired that she refused to pay the service charge because the property managers had filed to carry out some repairs. They in turn threatened to take her to court.

She talked for ten minutes or so. I sat, looked, and listened. Suddenly she stopped talking, looked at the papers all around her as if she had just woken up from a dream. She became calm and gentle. Her entire energy filed changed. Then she looked at me and said, “This isn't important at all, is it?” “No, it isn't,” I said. She sat quietly for a couple more minutes, then picked up her papers and left. The next morning she stopped me in the street, looking at me somewhat suspiciously. “What did you do to me? Last night was the first night in years that I slept well. In fact, I slept like a baby.”

She believed I had “done something” to her, but I had done nothing. Instead of asking what I had done to her, perhaps she should have asked what I had not done. I had to reacted, not confirmed the reality of her story, not fed her mind with more thought and her pain-body with more emotion. I had allowed her to experience whatever she was experiencing at that moment, and the power of allowing lies in non-interference, non-doing. Being present is always infinitely more powerful than anything one could say or do, although sometimes being present can give rise to words or actions.

What happened to her was not yet a permanent shift, but a glimpse of what is possible, a glimpse of what was already within her. In Zen, such a glimpse is called satori. Satori is a moment of Presence, a brief stepping out of the voice in your head, the thought processes, and their reflection in the body as emotion. It is the arising of inner spaciousness where before there was the clutter of thought and the turmoil of emotion.

The thinking mind cannot understand Presence and so will often misinterpret it. It will say that you are uncaring, distant, have no compassion, are not relating. The truth is, you are relating but at a level deeper than thought and emotion. In fact, at that level there is a true coming together, a true joining that goes far beyond relating. In the stillness of Presence, you can sense the formless essence in yourself and in the other as one. Knowing the oneness of yourself and the other is true love, true care, true compassion.

“TRIGGERS”

Some pain-bodies react to only one particular kind of trigger or situation, which is usually one that resonates with a certain kind of emotional pain suffered in the past. For example, if a child grows up with parents for whom financial issues are the source of frequent drama and conflict, he or she may absorb the parents' fear around money and develop a pain-body that is triggered whenever financial issues are involved. The child a adult gets upset or angry even over insignificant amounts of money. Behind the upset or anger lies issues of survival and intense fear. I have seen spiritual, that is to say, relatively conscious, people who started to shout, blame, and make accusations the moment they picked up the phone to talk to their stockbroker or realtor. Just as there is a health warning on every package of cigarettes, perhaps there should be similar warnings on every banknote and bank statement: “Money can activate the pain-body and cause complete unconsciousness.”

Someone who in childhood was neglected or abandoned by one or both parents will likely develop a pain-body that becomes triggered in any situation that resonates even remotely with their primordial pain of abandonment. A friend arriving a few minutes late to pick them up at the airport or a spouse coming home late can trigger a major pain-body attack. If their partner or spouse leaves them or dies, the emotional pain they experience goes far beyond the pain that is natural in such a situation. It may be intense anguish, long-lasting, incapacitating depression, or obsessive anger.

A woman who in childhood was physically abused by her father my find that her pain-body becomes easily activated in any close relationship with a man. Alternatively, the emotion that makes up her pain-body may draw her to a man whose pain-body is similar to that of her father. Her pain- body may feel a magnetic pull to someone who it senses will give it more of the same pain. That pain is sometimes misinterpreted as falling in love.

A man who had been an unwanted child and was given no love and a minimum of care and attention by his mother developed a heavy ambivalent pain-body that consisted of unfulfilled intense longing for his mother's love and attention and at the same time intense hatred toward her for withholding what he so desperately needed. When he became an adult, almost every woman would trigger his pain-body's neediness - a form of emotional pain - and this would manifest as an addictive compulsion to “conquer and seduce” almost every woman he met and in this way get the female love and attention that the pain-body craved. He became quite an expert on seduction, but as soon as a relationship turned intimate or his advances were rejected, the pain-body's anger toward his mother would come up and sabotage the relationship.

When you recognize your own pain-body as it arises, you will also quickly learn what the most common triggers are that activate it, whether it be situations or certain things other people do or say. When those triggers occur, you will immediately see them for what they are and enter a heightened state of alertness. Within a second or two, you will also notice the emotional reaction that is the arising pain-body, but in that state of alert Presence, you won't identify with it, which means the pain-body cannot take you over and become the voice in your head. If you are with your partner at the time, you may tell him or her: “What you just said (or did) triggered my pain-body.” Have an agreement with your partner that whenever either of you says or does something that triggers the other person's pain-body, you will immediately mention it. In this way, the pain-body can no longer renew itself through drama in the relationship and instead of pulling you into unconsciousness, will help you become fully present.

Every time you are present when the pain-body arises, some of the pain-body's negative emotional energy will burn up, as it were, and become transmuted into Presence. The rest of the pain-body will quickly withdraw and wait for a better opportunity to rise again, that is to say, when you are less conscious. A better opportunity for the pain-body to arise may come whenever you lose Presence, perhaps after you have had a few drinks or while watching a violent film. The tiniest negative motion, such as being irritated or anxious, can also serve as a doorway through which the pain- body can return. The pain-body needs your unconsciousness. It cannot tolerate the light of Presence.

THE PAIN-BODY AS AN AWAKENER

At first sight, it may seem that the pain-body is the greatest obstacle to the arising of a new consciousness in humanity. It occupies your mind, controls and distorts your thinking, disrupts you relationships, and feels like a dark cloud that occupies your entire energy field. It tends to make you unconscious, spiritually speaking, which means totally identified with mind and emotion. It makes you reactive, makes you say and do things that are designed to increase the unhappiness within yourself and the world.

As unhappiness increases, however, it also causes increasing disruption in your life. Perhaps the body can't take the stress anymore and develops an illness or some dysfunction. Perhaps you have become involved in an accident, some huge conflict situation or drama that was caused by the pain-body's desire for something bad to happen, or you become the perpetrator of physical violence. Or it all becomes too much and you cannot live with your unhappy self anymore. The pain-body, of course, is part of that false self.

Whenever you get taken over by the pain-body, whenever you don't recognize it or what it is, it becomes part of your ego. Whatever you identify with turns into ego. The pain-body is one of the most powerful things the ego can identify with, just as the pain-body needs the ego to renew itself through it. That unholy alliance, however, eventually breaks down in those cases where the pain-body is so heavy that the egoic mind structures, instead of being strengthened by it, are becoming eroded by the continuous onslaught of the pain-body's energy charge, in the same way that an electronic device can be empowered by an electric current but also destroyed by it if the voltage is too high.

People with strong pain-bodies often reach a point where they feel their life is becoming unbearable, where they can't take any more pain, any more drama. One person expressed this by saying plainly and simply that she was “Fed up with being unhappy.” Some people may feel, as I did, that they cannot live with themselves anymore. Inner peace then becomes their first priority. Their acute emotional pain forces them to disidentify from the content of their minds and the mental-emotional structures that give birth to and perpetuate the unhappy me. They then know that neither their unhappy story nor the emotion they feel is who they are. They realize they are the knowing, not the known. Rather than pulling them into unconsciousness, the pain-body becomes their awakener, the decisive factor that forces them into a state of Presence.

However, due to the unprecedented influx of consciousness we are witnessing on the planet now, many people no longer need to go through the depth of acute suffering to be able to disidentify from the pain-body. Whenever they notice they have slipped back into a dysfunctional state, they are able to choose to step out of identification with thinking and emotion and enter the state of Presence. They relinquish resistance, become still and alert, one with what is, within and without.

The next step in human evolution is not inevitable, but for the first time in the history of our planet, it can be a conscious choice. Who is making that choice? You are. And who are you? Consciousness that has become conscious of itself.

BREAKING FREE OF THE PAIN-BODY

A question people frequently ask is, “How long does it take to become free of the pain-body?” The answer is, of course, that it depends both on the density of an individual's pain-body as well as the degree or intensity of that individual's arising Presence. But it is not the pain-body, but identification with it that causes the suffering that you inflict on yourself and others. It is not the pain-body but identification with the pain-body that forces you to relive the past again and again and keeps you in a state of unconsciousness. So a more important question to ask would be this: “How long does it take to become free of identification with the pain-body?”

And the answer to that question: It takes no time at all. When the pain- body is activated, know that what you are feeling is th pain-body in you. This knowing is all that is needed to break your identification with it. And when identification with it ceases, the transmutation begins. The knowing prevents the old emotion from rising up in your head and taking over not only the internal dialogue, but also your actions as well as interactions with other people. This mean the pain-body cannot use you anymore and renew itself through you. The old emotion may then still live in you for a while and come up periodically. It may also still occasionally trick you into identifying with it again and thus obscure the knowing, but not for long. Not projecting the old emotion into situations means facing it directly within yourself. It may not be pleasant, but it won't kill you. Your Presence is more than capable of containing it. The emotion is not who you are.

When you feel the pain-body, don't fall into the error of thinking there is something wrong with you. Making yourself into a problem - the ego loves that. The knowing needs to be followed by accepting. Anything else will obscure it again. Accepting means you allow yourself to feel whatever it is you are feeling at that moment. It is part of the is-ness of the Now. You can't argue with what is. Well, you can, but if you do, you suffer. Through allowing, you become what you are: vast, spacious. You become whole. You are not a fragment anymore, which is how the ego perceives itself. Your true nature emerges, which is one with the nature of God.

Jesus points to this when he says, “Be ye whole, even as your Father in Heaven is whole.”1 The New Testament's “Be ye perfect” is a mistranslation of he original Greek word, which means whole. This is to say, you don't need to become whole, but be what you already are - with or without the pain- body.

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