Elias

For the first time, I'm seriously venturing into the territory of pure psychological pain. The only bad part of pain lives in the mind, so why not focus on the mind alone?

Two days ago, Costar asked me to

Pay attention to how you cope when you're hurt today.

I found that quite intriguing and gave it a serious try.

Whenever I felt unpleasant emotions arise in my body I observed how I coped with it.

One way of coping was to play down the cause of the emotion, to pretend that it's not that important. But this was also undermining the foundations of meaning and joy, a path into Nihilism.

Another way of coping was to just step back a bit and remember that I was not the emotion, I was the neutral observer of the emotion, and from that point of view could endure the emotion without suffering from it, and possibly transmute it into a different emotion.

At one point in the evening, I felt like the energy at the bottom of my chest was almost exploding. It was not painful but it was unpleasant and somewhat frightening.

Again, I had the same two options: play it down, reduce its cause, or: let it flow and just see if I can endure the feeling from a neutral observers perspective.

It was not that it was really painful, it just gave me the feeling that I might turn crazy. But hey, what's so bad about turning crazy?

So I allowed that energy to be and accepted that it was probably not going to explode and shatter my body into pieces. And almost to my surprise it really didn't and at one point felt neatly contained.

Not like needles of energy trying to find a way out but more like the concentrated, controlled energy in a fusion reactor. Eventually I found myself walking through Tønsberg to a Jazz concert with Nils with a glowing orb of energy in my chest, ready for anything.

It was definitely a worthwhile observation and I'm curious how far I will be able to increase and transform the energies available to me without turning crazy in the future.

Later today I also found this poem which made me slightly curious:

There is a pain—so utter—
by Emily Dickinson

There is a pain—so utter—
It swallows substance up—
Then covers the Abyss with Trance—
So Memory can step
Around—across—upon it—
As one within a Swoon—
Goes safely—where an open eye—
Would drop Him—Bone by Bone.

Yet another perspective on suffering and consciousness that I found quite interesting yesterday is Yuval Noah Harari's recent video on exactly that topic. I don't know how to answer the questions he posed but first of all I like the questions that he's asking and the fact that he's asking them. I'd love to have Sadhguru and David Eagleman chew on it together.

And here we have Jordan Peterson talking about the current cause of human suffering. And interestingly, even here I can observe how I cope with the hurt.
First I don't like his perspective and the way he speaks, so I distance myself from what he's saying. After a while, I think he has a valid point, but I still don't even try to imagine the suffering he is actually referring to. I stay detached on an intellectual level, trying to only grasp the abstract idea behind what he's saying. Essentially I pick out the similarities between what I've read in the [Tao Te Ching](), in Wilber's [Integral Meditation]() and in Sadhguru's [Karma] and numerous conversations with him.