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Naturally Thriving |
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Hurt vs. Pain I entered my meditation this morning thinking about fear. When I looked at my fear (no matter what kind or when) and I chunked it up I discovered that what I seemed to be most afraid of was being hurt. Then, I noticed I was not afraid of experiencing pain. When I asked myself what the difference was I realized that I have defined pain as a transitory feeling that people have for a particular time and then it goes away. I have defined hurt as being damaged or defective in some way. Then I realized I thought of being damaged or defective as a permanent condition. Something that is damaged or defective is never the same again. You may be able to still use it or put it back together enough so that it is still functional but it is never completely "right" again. For instance, if you drop a cup and chip it a little it is still functional and can be used, but it is never as "good" as a cup that has never been damaged. The cup is permanently defective. What's more, the damage can be recognized by others. I also began to realize that the reason I am so afraid of this is because of the way people in today's society react to something they think of as being damaged or defective. They want to get rid of it, or at the least it is something to be kept out of sight and put into use only when nothing "better" is available. My next realization was that I had come to the conclusion as a child that I must have been born damaged or defective in some way because much of the time my family treated me as someone they would like to get rid of. I have spent much of my life trying to prove that I am not defective or that at least the defect is small enough that it can be covered up or overlooked. Or that I have attributes that have enough value that they compensate for the defects. I have also spent a lot of time trying to avoid being hurt so that the damage can be contained and not get any worse. This has been the whole reasoning and thought behind my ideas of not being "good enough". I also think it is a major source of my panic attacks. What if I try doing something and it proves once and for all that I am just too damaged or defective to be of any real value? Then I would have to accept once and for all my family's judgment of me. I would have to accept the fact that I would never have any real value to anyone. That was just too big of a risk to take. I also began to realize that this is why money has never been very important to me. I realized at a very young age that money was not a measurement of how much people value me, it is only a measurement of how much they value my services. I knew that "I" was not the same as "my services" and I wanted them to value the "I' that I knew to be me. So......all of this brings me back to the original thoughts I started out with this morning. I have been reading over a lot of the documents I down loaded from the net. Many of those documents are about language and the nature of subject and object and the new ideas about Quantum Physics. It all started to gel together for me. I had learned to nominalize people, including myself. I thought of people in the same way that I thought of objects. But what all of these documents were saying was that people are not objects.....they are subjects. And, what Quantum Physics is beginning to prove is that reality itself is a subject. Subjects can not be hurt, damaged, or broken. Subjects are groups of ideas that are constantly in the process of changing into something else. And subjects are not defective. A particular subject may not be useful within a certain context but it always has value and use within some context. This means that "I" have never been hurt (permanently damaged, broken, or defective) in any way. I have had painful experiences but I was not "hurt" by those experiences. And it means that I have absolute value and worth within some contexts. I guess it's about time I began to discover what some of those contexts are.
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