This Pain Costs Too Much
Key Lesson: Resentment is the coin with which we are paid whenever the things we say we do for others are secretly done for the sake of ourselves.
The Happiness of Dropping Painful Demands
The real cause of our unhappiness has nothing to do with which way events or relationships turn. Even though it often feels like it, dark inner states aren't born in the actual unfolding of any present moment, but are born afterwards, from unconscious resistance to any event that somehow opposes our wishes.
It is clear that the source of our suffering isn't that life fails to live up to our expectations, but that we live from a nature that meets life with countless unconscious demands. And contrary to what this nature would have us believe, happiness is not having our demands met.
Lasting contentment is being free of our own undeveloped and demanding nature. Our higher nature is able to see that the only thing that makes us unhappy is our ideas about how to make ourselves happy. The selfish mind can't see this contradiction in consciousness because its nature is this contradiction.
Begin today, right this moment, to see your life through the eyes of your higher nature. Use its wise eyes to assist you in seeing all the ways in which you have wanted to make sense of suffering. And then see that suffering never makes any sense!
Use higher vision to see that the pain your mind would have you flee, it first created -- by telling you how to stay safe. Truth invites you to get reckless with what's been wrecking you. Learn to see the deception in any assumption that wants you to believe that there is no higher alternative to your suffering than to endure it.
Never listen to any pain that is asking you what to do about it. The moment you seek a solution to its tormented question, you're under its authority, which makes you its victim.
To achieve each new level of happiness, and the higher freedom that comes with it, takes special inner effort. Meet as many moments as you can with this new wisdom. Look at all of life, and all of its demanding relationships, from the undemanding eyes of the Truth. In this way, if you do your part, you can't help but hit the higher mark. One day the new freedoms you're sure to see, you will be.
