"I love the smell of roses,
I love the soft, sweet touch that filters through the senses,
The bright pink colour that my imagination associates with it,
The memory of my gran, the touch of her smooth wrinkles as I sit on her knee.
Its amazing life, the detail, the perception, the intimacy.
But humans become dead to it. They become removed, separate; they live in a
mental interpretation of what’s happening instead of what’s happening. It
gives the feeling of pressure, deadness, an emotional instability or fixation on
problems.
Waking up, or the disassociation with separation means the flooding back of
overwhelming sensation. Everything becomes felt...
Everything becomes felt, the pain and pleasure; but
it’s so immediate, nothing is rejected – it even loses its title of pain and
pleasure. It's a radically different way of living – for life to express
immediately from stillness rather than going through a filter of separation that
seems to make experience numb.
The main functioning of separation is the fixation on avoiding pain and
attaining pleasure. The mammal is designed to move towards pleasure and avoid
pain but where there is separation, this game is identified with then it becomes
overly important. The belief of that separate person is that pleasure means
completion and pain is incompletion.
This game becomes crushing.
On an emotional level we only want to sustain pleasurable feelings.
In a relationship, we only want to maintain pleasurable circumstances and
interactions.
In our idea of ourselves, we only want to maintain a pleasurable image.
In our financial circumstance, we only want to maintain the pleasure of having
the money and growth.
The separate person wants to avoid half of life.
You can see how it becomes a world of suffering for the human because this game
is an impossible game. Its like a mouse running in its wheel believing that 'one
day' it will get to the end of the wheel.
Our biggest avoidance is the avoidance of feelings and emotions. This creates
the worst part of suffering, as to do this, we have to live only in our head and
we have to cut off pleasure feelings as well – as they come together. So as we
shut down feeling painful feelings we then shut down the pleasurable ones as
well. So life becomes numb. We become very unclear about how we feel or what we
want – we become dead, like robots.
This is how humans do terrible things, because they can’t feel.
If you don’t feel for yourself, you certainly won’t feel for others. So
lying to others, using others, cheating on others, stealing from others is
numbness- no feeling is involved. Often people don’t even have the awareness
that they are doing these things, they don’t even know they are lying; they
may see it as keeping the peace or helping another. The thoughts they tell
themselves will often tell a positive story about their actions, as they want to
only feel pleasure about their self image so they often don’t reflect back
what’s actually happening. You reflect back what makes you look best or fits
with your identity (if you have a negative identity then you will be fixated on
telling yourself how bad you are)
Whatever the case, the person is always in the head and thinking and trying to
keep the feeling at bay rather than letting the feeling over take them and be
felt.
And, its amazing when it happens- the intensity of feeling without a person
trying to suppress them. Its beautiful, the pleasure or pain feeling- engulfing
or encompassing.
The feelings never come to an end – that's not enlightenment – that's what
the sense of self hopes – "I will one day just have pleasure feelings" –
Ahahahah. Bless it.
It’s so beautiful to stand naked in life, not trying to be anything- just
what’s happening. Feelings, sensations, emotions, thoughts, colours, smells,
sounds, sights, rolling in and out like an ocean meeting the sand, no wave stays
but its all made of the same ocean.
What beauty."
(Lisa Cairns)