An article by Sha'Tara, local writer and friend.

Life: Do you Want Pain or Pleasure with That?
               
[thoughts from a   ~burning woman~  Sha’Tara ]

“Hey Greg, with all the pain this causes me, why do we do it?” … “Art causes more pain than pleasure for the artist”… (The Sun and the Moon and the Stars – Steven Brust)

How about substituting “life” for ‘art’ and “living” for ‘artist’? 

I read somewhere that beauty could never be found without ugly—and I suppose, vice versa.  That’s the thing about life, isn’t it; the gnawing reality of dualism we somehow want to get around, or out of, by any means.  We cannot.  Always, if you want a thing really bad, you have to nurture yourself and mature yourself in the art of relating to its opposite.  If you want to walk with God you will have to carry the Devil on your back.  If you want to experience a truly beautiful sunset, somewhen you will have experienced that sunrise when the sun and clouds formed a rosy shroud over your dying child’s bed and you will remember that lump in your throat you wished had choked you then.  For those who are observant, this ‘balancing’ is quite evident.  Perhaps life is an equation and mathematics is, as claimed, the universal language: I don’t buy that because if it is, then math becomes another religion.

Using the ‘artist’ imagery, to be a compassionate being is being an artist—living each moment in excruciating awareness of surroundings and feelings; feeling passionately with mind, heart and body, these being the brushes, palette and paints, the music notes and the words ; the one half burning in pain as in a fire, the other half rising from the embers laughing in the waves of the naked ocean, neither ever complete, neither ever done.  The fire evaporates the waters, these hiding in clouds; and the waters quenching the flames but the fire lives on in the embers.

That said about the necessity of duality, then what is this ‘One’ or Single Source people insist on, parroted in writing and in speeches?  Fine, maybe there is a ‘One’ some-before-where and some-before-when, but who’s to really know?  No one can, and that’s the joke on us by the ‘wool over the eyes’ pullers.  Even a god (they at least do exist, they can be interacted with) would have no way of knowing this ‘One’ because in awareness we (god or human) are already far from Source (outsourced!) and if ‘One’ is as claimed, there is no returning to such an absolute.  Returning translates into one word: obliteration. 

That’s easy to figure out.  What I am, all that I am, does not, cannot, exist at location: Source One.  That’s the point of setting off life as a wildfire.  “Go forth, be fruitful and multiply; subdue, i.e., change yourself and change everything in the process—no holds  barred, into forever infinity.  Don’t come crying back to Source—your pitiful human cries cannot be heard.  Whatever has ‘become’ through duality—differentiated as life—is in itself meaningless and poisonous at location: Source One.  I can put it one better: none of it actually originated at Source One, only energy, pure, raw, primordial.  Source One therefore is not the source of life, we are.  We invented the knots that tie energetic strands together, creating nodes of information defining the indefinable: creation from ‘nothing.’

Was it not said, ‘He who puts his hand to the plow then looks back is not fit for service in the kingdom of God.’?  There is no looking back for answers or solutions.  We ‘sent’ ourselves as sheep among wolves, as solutions to problems, never really sure when we are creating the problems, or when solving them.  It’s rather obvious, isn’t it, that some ‘send’ themselves as wolves among sheep, so let’s not get too cocky about which is which as such roles are so easily exchanged.  As an actor changes character by changing his costume, how quickly we exchange roles with a  change of mind.  Today the beautiful, tomorrow the ugly. 

If we took our place, our role, seriously, we would all know we are artists in a cosmic studio without walls, floors or ceilings.  We would realize there is no heaven, no nirvana, no permanent ‘safe house’ to hole up into when the storms of life get rough.  We would create temporary abodes where we, or the desperate we find ourselves shepherding, would find refuge for a time.  But we would never lose track of the obvious: that we are on an infinite path without footprints and as we go we create our temporary heavens and hells which we must eventually leave to carry on.  Perhaps the only ‘mystery’ worth pondering is the changing endlessness of what was, is, and will be.  We are forever walking on water, or could be.  It’s not good enough just to master the art of floating in the water with our noses sticking out so we can breathe.

So, let’s see: life is art.  We create or we die—yet can’t die: an oxymoron?  Well I could say that those who do not consciously create are really the living dead, letting whatever powers that be do the creating for them and setting them on the stage as extras.  And why won’t they create their own works?  Because of the pain.  They don’t want to deal with that because they are programmed to believe that if it hurts, it’s bad, it’s evil.  In today’s world the ‘feel good’ rules, hence why this society is not only morally bankrupt, but its insistence on the ‘feel good’ has even destroyed its vaunted fiscal responsibility, putting it on the fast track to oblivion.

To understand however, we must realize that pain, as we must experience it, is not our ‘lot’ as it was once taught.  As we learn about giving and grow into self-empowerment we gain the power to transmute pain into sorrow.  Sorrow, unlike pain, is the compassionate nature bending over a troubled and suffering world and offering healing.  Thus sorrow attracts its ‘opposite’ which is really its mate: joy.  But true joy will never be found where sorrow does not walk.  Hence why people cannot find joy in their lives and substitute pleasure and fun, cheap, tawdry imitations of the real thing,  popular because they are a drug… and can be sold and bought in the marketplace with huge profits. 

“Life is not a thing, it is a way.  It is a series of happenings, it is the evolution of patterns which carry information, it is growth and decay and re-growth.  Wherever the possibility of this exists, life will be.” (The Avatar—Poul Anderson)

“Nothing is absolute, and you have to go with the odds.  The only thing that’s absolute is death, and not even that if you believe the revs.” (The Parafaith War – L. E. Modesitt, Jr.)