Loss – Suffering – Coming to Terms With Evil

Evil Exists – every religion and philosophical system has to account for the misery we see around us – storms, flood, volcanos, disease, human frustration and animal predation.

You Are A Warrior Against Evil – There is no such thing as a warrior FOR evil. If you are a warrior for evil, you have merged yourself into a mass, un-individualized unthinking suction into darkness. In pursuit of base whim, you have actually surrendered your potential maturity and thus your autonomy.

You Are A Warrior For Good – Facing the fact that you are here to halt at least some of the Universal Suffering, you must come to terms with loss – specifically, your own.

DREAMS – Do your dream explore inner and outer pain? How much is fear, how much is anxiety, how much is collective unconscious and shared human history? We fear everyone CAN’T be happy at once. How do we educate ourselves to surf this intolerable dilemma?

Pain is Joy’s Shadow – Joy is an excess of feeling and so is suffering. When we long to “numb out”, we numb everything. If we live our lives in fear, we avoid the potential excitement of holding breath on the edge of discovery.

Challenge – What if we allow ourselves to feel all of it? Poets must – artists of all kinds explore and expand the edges of perception and assessment. Possible philosophical coping mechanisms used by Buddhists are – “It’s all illusion” “Practice taming the wild mind” or religious – “Suffering brings us closer to God in developing compassion for all creation” and “Birth pangs are necessary to bring new life.” At least we can keep our mind and soul responsive and deepening and that benefits the whole planet. Warrior strategies focus on harm reduction.

Danger – Too much suffering breeds helplessness. We stop even trying to better our human situation while attracting predators to such easy prey. Even worse, we become predators ourselves, bragging to the godless that we are the new potentates. Cruelty breeds endless cruelty. There must be a way to step off this treadmill – there’s enough suffering going around without manufacturing more.

Opportunity – Imagination itself comes from discomfort, even misery. We see a need to expand our mental repertoire, to magically increase the very dimensions of thought that seem to imprison us. As a species we have broken through this many times. There must be further epiphanies awaiting. How does this apply to you? Ask your dreams. Open and relax your mind. Keep track of your dreams in your Training journal – not just actual dreams, but your thought possibilities in reflection. What if you could not fail? Turn to your dream partners for ideas. Who are we really? Who could we become?

#Haiku: Closing Prayer

Peace!
May we all be free from suffering
And the roots of suffering.