In Spite of Ourselves, Ultimate Trust, and the Absolute Earliest Preschool: Experience Is Divinity, Part Two — Pain Is Wisdom Gift-Wrapped

How Pain Is Like Comedy: They Help Us Remember Our Divine State of Unfear, Teach Us to Have Faith, and Reveal Wisdom Needed to Get Us hOMe

You might ask yourself why humans are the only species that laughs. And this is where it gets really freaky. So you’ll be glad we have the laughter.

Pain Is Wisdom Gift-Wrapped

If you remove the veil between you and Divinity, what is the one feeling you cannot possibly have which is also the most difficult to deal with in life and yet is central to human existence?

Fear. Of course there’s no fear. When there is nothing hidden and you are surrounded with Love, how could there be? Conversely, human existence is characterized by limited knowledge, the creation of an unknown or darkness in which we can expand fear, and the acting that comes from such limited knowing and exaggerated fear which can appear to be unloving.

And all of this creates pain.

But is pain truly unloving? I mean, in an ultimate sense?

 

“God So Loved the World That He Gave Us Pain.”

Let us say, “God so loves us that He gives us pain.” By that I mean, Divinity feels so much compassion for the ways we humans manage to screw up—and by that I mean are able to separate ourselves from knowing Reality and create unknowing and darkness … what psychologists call an unconscious—that It gives us reminders and road signs on the way back hOme. He gives us all the wisdom we can take in.

However, in such ignorance we reject all “His” blessings. By putting a separation between us and our Divinity we put Divinity in darkness, in the Unknown, and all with It all Its blessings, including wisdom.

We reject even the greatest gift that we as Divinity have given ourselves. We reject the clues and bread crumbs we have left for ourselves to follow to find the way back home. We reject the pain of life.

For the pain of life is actually wisdom that is gift-wrapped to hide its nature. This wisdom stays hidden until we accept our pain and open it, so to speak, to find the gift of understanding which brings with it always ever more release from the fear we have chosen….

We, as Divinity, of course want to show ourselves how there is never anything to be afraid of and that fear is an imaginary creation of ours.

Why You Don’t See Hyenas at Comedy Clubs

For if you felt one with God and thought of life’s dramas as a kind of play, would you have fear? Not a lot, would you? If you knew it was like the movie I was talking about… like you were sitting in a theater watching your life…while you would feel fear and other emotions you would do so in a way that they would even be desirable or fun, knowing there was no real dire consequences of any of it?

I’ll say this about nonhuman planetmates (a) they don’t laugh, and (b) they always have a sense that they’re one with God…. So they always have part of them knowing that they are just playing a character. But not so for us humans. So our fear and distress is magnified to the limits of our imagination. Indeed, imaginative people, creative people, will know how they have both more fear and more ecstasy than others … and so are also more likely to be labeled bipolar, by the way.

The Absolute Earliest Preschool

A lot of the way we help ourselves remember our Divine state of unfear and reveal the wisdom needed to take us hOMe comes back to that peek-a-boo I was talking about. That is one of those bread crumbs that we, as Divinity, have provided ourselves right at the beginning of life. Just as the Divine provides the laughter to humans, which is a result of our little adult games of peek-a-boo we play with ourselves and with each other. So important is such learning that it is hard to find a mother-child who has not experienced it and reveled in peek-a-boo. Though I doubt any mother ever consciously knew why she was doing it except that it was fun and gave so much pleasure! Remember that word—pleasure.

How Pain Is Like Comedy

And it is the same way with God and us as it is with mothers and their babies. Just as the Divine inspires mothers to play peek-a-boo to train children to not trust their fears as being real and we as adults act comical, tell jokes, and poke fun at each other to help each other learn there is nothing to fear, so also our Divine nature brings pain to us.

Pain is the next step of the peek-a-boo training. It is the hardest step. But the previous practices in peek-a-boo, joking and playful kidding, and laughter helps prepare us for this next step, where when we are fearful, we might have the expectation…and it would be righteous…that soon the clouds will part, the sun will shine…but even more than that…

Peek-a-Boo Is a Taste of God’s Training Later in Life

Remember, that early peek-a-boo training has an effect on you as a child: At first you were fearful but after a while you expect Mother to be there all the time…if you have enough experience of it. For, you see, peek-a-boo is a sample of training for God’s training later in life. Now…let’s put it this way:

Pain is God playing peek-a-boo with us.

He uses pain to guide us from danger and toward our true path.

In Spite of Ourselves….

When we have enough experience in life—by that I mean when we have had enough trainings, practice, and events that have revealed the falsity and groundlessness of our fears—we know that pain is not the useless thing we start out thinking it is. We learn that when things are not going right…sometimes the car breaks down or we break our ankle…there may be a better outcome for us in store than if it had gone smoothly.

It requires self-reflection, of course, to see this. But how many times have we found out after the fact that the bad or painful thing was the perfect thing to have happened? How often have we realized that it was God, or our Inner Divinity, who was helping us out, derailing our plans, because we weren’t supposed to be doing something? Or we need to be doing something different? If you are reading this, I would bet that you have reached that point where you know that you are being guided to something better through some of your bad experiences.

Pain Is God Playing Peek-a-Boo

So, just as God inspired mothers to train their infants to not trust their fears as being reality, just as we as adults enjoy the blessing of laughter as after each divine prank we learn how useless is our worry, He even set up the next step where when we are in pain we might have the expectation, and it would be true, that soon we will see things differently, that eventually we will be better for the experience, and that ultimately everything is just fine, that we even might be grateful for having gone through what we did.

This is the basis for what we call faith…which is the notion that the Universe, at base, is “friendly”…if not out and out loving…and that ultimately there is nothing to fear.

So, for pain, God is playing peek-a-boo with us…. Our Inner Divinity has blessed ourselves with it to guide us from danger toward our true path.

Of course we bitch and complain when we don’t get what we want, when misfortune brings down our cherished fantasies…and sure it is painful. But I doubt there is any of you who haven’t looked back at what we had intended and what we were guided to instead, and said, “Thank God I’m not in charge of my life… If Ida gotten my way, well, hell, what a stupid idea that ended up being. God sure must love me to sustain and teach and guide me…in spite of myself.”

He does that for all of us and that’s what I meant about the pain being His blessing to us.

But of course there’s much more to it than that….

Continue with Graduate Courses in the University of Divinity. Pain Is the Professor … Bringing Us Ever hOMe: Experience Is Divinity, Part Three — All We Are Saying … Is Give Love a Chance

Return to Our Daily “En-lighten-ments” Which Reveal Our True Nature as Bliss and the Nature of Creation as Play: Experience Is Divinity, Part One—The Cosmic Giggle

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