It is an irrepressible fact of human life that we are frequently visited by the sensations we call pain. So, with resignation and disappointment, I acknowledge that pain must be the expression Creation chose to alert us when we have encountered stimuli detrimental to our physical well-being. With equal disappointement, I also assume that pain is the expression Creation chose to warn us when we have encountered stimuli adverse to the integrity of our psyche. We suffer all to avoid physical pain. We resort to everything else to avoid psychological dissonance and mental despair.
We are subject to a wide asssortment of emotional dissonance that causes us to experience the state of being we call unhappiness. We struggle with the pain of disappointment in our successes as well as in our failures. We are incesssantly motivated by our desire to be happy.
We shamelessly consume an enormous wealth of time, money, and energy seeking happiness borne of that we call love, pleasure, excitement, power, and success. We are driven by our need to live the good life and are many time over disappointed and disillusioned when attaining our own definition of the good life and the happiness we expect from it leaves us unsatisfied.
But it is neither the presence of pain which violates our senses nor the absence of pleasure which delights them that contribute most to the unhappiness and pervasive emptiness that infests human life. It is the Pain Of Mortal Being and the Fear Of Eternal Being that impinges most on the human desire to be happy.
The Pain Of Mortal Being, both intermittent and chronic, is the residue of the only fear that taints the human soul. It is the afterbirth of every ambiguous and foreboding feeling that accompanied every first realization that, on our own, we are small vulnerable and starkly insignificant creatures in Creation's vast universe.
To be is to know the Pain Of Mortal Being. It is the painful progeny we beget when the unconscious self consorts with the anxiety of being--the self's awareness of existence in a universe it can adjust to but is woefully impotent in its ability to control. It is the consort that conceives fear and give birth to anger and other emotions that make us feel hurt or behave cruelly in ill-fated attempts to find relief from our pain.
It is the Pain Of Mortal Being which invites our unmasked willingness to control other human being or, failing that, create pain and misery for them.
To be is to know the fear of mortal death and the dreaded possibilities of oblivion or eternal existence. We know it and sometimes experience abject horror over the knowledge that we have no ability to prevent any of it. It is inevitable. Our fear would not prevade our lives so much, if and only if we had no knowledge of our mortal being. But memory and an awareness of our inability to absolutely govern our present and eternal destinities is the emotional reservoir of the Fear Of Eternal Being and the generous wellspring frrom which flows the Pain Of Mortal Being.
Ultimately, it is our need to have power over death, pain, disease, and unsatisfied desires, indeed to have power over all the fateful forces that make life difficult or plunge our souls into eternity, that feeds the Fear Of Eternal Being and nourishes the Pain Of Mortal Being. In the sbsence of the need for absolute control over our mortal and eternal destinies, we have no fear of our lack of it.
But men and women whose emotions and sense of well being are grounded in a compelling need to absolutely govern their fate, generally perceive power and the control of people and things in the present as the solution to the Pain Of Mortal Being and the fear of death and the possibility of eternal existence.
Failing to understand the source of their pain and fear, they erroneously believe that the more control they exercise in the present, the less anxiety they will have about the future and the less pain they must endure because of it. Human pursuit for a narcotic for the Pain Of Mortal Being and the Fear Of Eternal Being is a two-fold proposition. We crave control over all that can happen to us in our present future and we crave happiness and good feelings to supplant the terror that the fear of death and eternity propagates upon what we believe are our eternal souls.