We’re all given challenges and problems to overcome. It’s what makes us the people we are and gives us our identity. We define ourselves by the things we’ve been through and create an identity, a story that explains the reasons for what we are. It’s known as the ego spiritually and it defines and creates our personalities.
The Ego
In spirituality, the ego is often seen as something negative that needs to disappear before you can get anywhere. It’s an integral part of our spiritual makeup though and we couldn’t exist without it or rather, we exist because of it. It can also cause many difficulties and pain when it becomes out of balance.
Our society as a whole has become imbalanced towards the ego, I believe, and it’s led to pain being spread more and more. Often people are unaware of the pain that they’re causing others or how the dynamic of the painful situation that they’re in works. Pain that people aren’t able to deal with is usually spread onto others who then have to deal with it. If they are unable to understand it then it spreads to the next person almost like a virus. With understanding, this can be reversed and painful interactions can be eliminated, person by person. Wouldn’t you like to be a person that eliminates pain from the world as you function rather than someone who spreads it?
It’s been said that the body is the vehicle for the soul. Wouldn’t it be good if you could drive the vehicle skillfully and be able to get to where you want to go instead of being in a chaotic game of bumper cars in which you hope that you got somewhere by the time it ends? Life can seem like that sometimes if our egos and stories run away from us or we become victims of other people’s egos that are out of balance. I’m going to explain some scenarios and how they work so that you can better understand this dynamic of ego and pain so that you can control it, avoid it or be able to deal with it more easily.
Feeling Victimized
When something hurtful is done to you there are different ways you could react to it. You could externalize it or internalize it. I’m going to use the analogy of someone hitting you as an external example for simplicity but interactions are often more complex. Once understood though, we usually realize that it’s just the same problem again and again presented in different ways until at some point hopefully, we can understand it and then move past it.
If someone hits you it’s painful and unpleasant and you’ll feel victimized. For whatever reason, someone has decided to hit you and hurt you. It’s likely that they have been victimized themselves and in some strange way they’re reaching out to you for another perspective in an effort to understand the pain that they’re unable to deal with. Now they’re unloading it on you. The normal response would be to hit them back. Now they get to see what it feels like. Most likely that person had been hit by someone else and hurt by them then decided to be the victimizer instead to understand how somebody could do that to them and what they gained by doing it. When someone hurts us we feel like something has been taken from us and if we reverse it then we feel like we’ll be able to take it back. It’s wrong to hit someone like that and you’ll teach them what it’s like and how it feels.
Aren’t you the victimizer now though? If it’s wrong then isn’t that now what you’ve become? How does it feel to victimize someone? Now you know. Also, do you think the victimizer has learned their lesson? Did you fight back like they should have when they were victimized the first time and now they understand? Or maybe you weren’t supposed to fight back like they didn’t and now they’ll have to try it again hoping for someone who doesn’t fight back. Or maybe they still don’t understand dealing with being hit and they’ll just hit you back and you can hit each other back and forth all day until one of you can’t continue. Or maybe you’ll both succumb to your injuries and die there together lying next to each other.
Externalization Vs. Internalization
Maybe there’s another way. It seems like the old adage of turning the other cheek may apply here. It’s hard. You have to be strong. There’s no victory if you can’t be knocked out. It’s hard to get into the ring though if you’re not ready and willing to take a punch. Maybe boxing isn’t your thing and a different analogy like knitting a sweater could also work. Breaking the needles in half or throwing the half-knitted sweater away because you poked yourself won’t get you anywhere. We need to be able to handle the challenges life presents us with and deal with them.
There are different ways that we can deal with problems by either externalizing or internalizing them. Hitting someone because you’ve been hit is very external. There’s pain out there and you can fight it or protect yourself from it. Understanding the whole process and its possibilities actually means that you’re no longer there. You’re looking at it from somewhere outside it. You can use your understanding to control the process. An example could be body armour or a big fence that prevents someone from hitting you. Maybe different needles that won’t poke you solves your knitting pain. You’ve made a judgement and understanding of the world around you and have come to terms with it. By understanding the patterns of something we can choose to exist around it or use it to our benefit rather than being a victim of it.
Injured people dealing with a lot of pain often end up being the people causing the pain as well. They’ve made a judgement and understanding that the external world is a hurtful place. That’s just how people interact with each other; hurting each other. If you don’t do it to them first they’ll do it to you anyways. If you don’t do it to them then someone will anyways so why not? It becomes a very hurtful world to be in that way. The realities of the world around us end up reflecting our own inner feelings and beliefs about it. We’ll perceive what we want to and end up experiencing it. Why would you want to experience and live in a painful world? Through healing and understanding, we can control the reality we exist in.
Often we react to pain in a more internalized fashion. Rather than an externalized view of a bad world hurting each other, you internalize that there’s something bad about you and you’re unable to be part of the world because of it. You’re just not… You can’t…because. You never… You’re letting yourself down and can only blame yourself. You believe you’re a good person but you just don’t cut it. It’s often because of the world around you and it’s unfair. In fact, you’re like some solitary soldier, wounded but soldiering on. It’s not right though but here you are, a victim of unfairness. Surely someday you’ll be recognized in the lottery of unfairness and be given the prize that there must be to set everything right and it surely must be your turn by now. There’s no prize like that though. Choosing an identity for yourself as a victim who suffers from pain might be a perfect match for someone who can’t deal with some pain and they’d love to help by unloading it onto you. We communicate with each other emotionally, even quantumly beyond time and distance with our hearts like big antennas and our interactions with others often happen through subconscious choices because of this. You need to understand what you’re broadcasting out to others. They’ll be attracted to that signal.
Everyone has pain and suffers. You’re not alone. Often, it’s not that people don’t care. It’s just that they don’t understand how that’s such a problem because they’re not you. For them, it may be easy or no problem at all and they don’t understand. For the person you are, however, it’s a big deal and so painful. Conversely, you probably have the magic solution to some pain that they’ve never been able to deal with because of who they are and their identity.
We’re all in charge of our own identities, however. While we can’t control the actions of others around us we can control our reaction to them; we decide that. We can also control our actions in response to those things as well. Our actions also usually dictate the responses of other people. If people don’t think they’ll get the responses or answers they want they’ll move on to someone else for an opportunity to unload their pain.
Stop the Spread of Pain
Internalized pain people must realize that they can also unload pain onto others. Being trapped in a limbo of pain denies the world the potential that’s possible within you. Relationships and commitments may suffer because of your inability. Generally, you may bring people down around you and drain them like a vampire. Your pity party may start to harm others around you, leaving them with your pain to now understand and deal with. You may even project the same situation of pain onto someone thinking it’s fair or like sharing. You’ll hurt them in the same way again and again but their response shows they’re never really experiencing as you have; they just never feel it like you so you keep doing it. Truthfully, it’s you that cannot feel their unique pain they experience in reaction to yours because you’re not them in just the same way that they’re not you and cannot identically feel yours.
We need to deal with pain and stop its spread to others. Healing and understanding our pain isn’t even optional because life presents us with the same lessons again and again until we finally learn from them and move on. Little coincidences and synchronicities work like magic around us and tie us all together. If we don’t notice or learn it then can be like a classroom of pain that always follows us around. Unfortunately, the classroom never leaves us but it doesn’t have to always be a lesson in pain. There are all kinds of other more enjoyable lessons to be learned in your classroom as well. Also, it never ends but you can go way past the Ph.D. level. There’s no limit. It’s where all your best memories will come from.
In Egyptian mythology, there is the story of the scarab, the little beetle that rolls a ball of dung into the sun every morning allowing it to rise. We’re like that beetle that rolls our pain, our dung into a ball to make creation. We’re actually an inseparable mix of light and dark, pain and pleasure, connecting and separating, in and out, male and female; duality. It’s actually the negativity, the pain, that allows physical matter to exist. That separation allows identity, and the ego to exist and like a crystal growing in a saturated solution of energy, your physical being grows into existence. Understanding the balance between pain and joy is actually the key to controlling physical matter. It’s also the way we navigate our lives and the situations and relationships that we find ourselves in. And so our egos provide the “I am”, self-awareness that allows us to exist and we just take for granted that the sun rises every morning and it does. Would it rise if we didn’t exist to see it? Doesn’t the way it looks depend on how we perceive it? We are creating reality every day and with understanding, you can choose what you create. There can be no free will or choice if you’re in ignorance. Understand yourself.
I believe that we’re all god, spirit, the magical connection of everything or whatever you like to call it having a human experience. Each one of us is a perspective that together makes an infinite collection of information and wisdom that is god. It’s hard to really know for sure until you run the experiment in real-time and see how it actually works. It’s hard to really know what it’s like until you’ve done it yourself. That’s our job, I believe, as information and wisdom collectors for god, making everything exist. God, the sun, and creation shine down on us and let us exist and in turn, we witness and experience it and allow god to exist. The sun is outside us but created inside us as well. We can let it shine out of us and live under it as well. No, it doesn’t shine directly out of your ass. There’s work to do. Be the beetle, the scarab and roll it into a ball. Get your life rolling and create the sun. Find joy and not pain to pass on to others. Understand the interactions that you’re having and create what you want from them. Often, a little understanding can go a long way.