Our Awareness Of The Source Makes The Difference Between Pleasure And Pain

creatorA question I received: How can a person avoid suffering?

My Answer: Ask yourself: who inflicts all the problems and suffering on you? If you felt that they all come from the Creator, you’d already feel better.

It’s similar to a surgeon who operates on you: even though it’s a painful process, you know that what he is doing is good for you. In fact, if you have enough understanding of the gravity of your illness and the efficacy of the treatment, then you won’t feel pain at all. If you understand that the operation will make you get well, you will even ask the surgeon to perform the operation sooner!

Thus, it’s because we do not have this sensation that we feel suffering. The feeling of suffering is not caused by the pain itself, but by the fact that we don’t feel Who inflicts the suffering upon us.

If you could feel that the pain comes from a surgeon rather than a criminal, then you wouldn’t experience it as pain, and you would even be grateful to the one causing it, instead of trying to fight what the criminal is doing to you.

So, what you lack is not a disconnection from the pain or from the act itself, but the revelation of the Creator, who is the one responsible for the act as well as its aim. Only then will you sense pleasure instead of suffering.

It is a psychological problem, really. Even scientific experiments show that the suffering and pleasure felt inside a body stem from the same processes. Pain and pleasure are just surges of sensations in two different directions. For the body, they are the same thing, and it’s only later that our mind discerns them as different. The body, however, feels them as the same thing.

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: How To Go Through Life Without The Suffering
Laitman.com Post: Infinite Pleasure Is Right In Front Of You (Advanced)
Baal HaSulam Article: “The Creator’s Concealment and Revelation”
Shamati #50: “Two States”

2 Comments

  1. Please, Iwould like to know where the Zohar quotes ‘pain and pleasure’ together. I am sure the reason for which a famous poet (G.B. Marino, 1569-1625) involved in Kabbalah had on this two words the source of his great production of works, concerns the Kabbalah. I know I read somewhere in Scholem such conceipt, but I am missing it. I thank you very much.

  2. What about the pain of feeling unloved or the pain of paranoia? If you are trapped in a world that does not exist, how can you escape to enlightenment? (my sister is a paranoid schizophrenic)

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