Ultimate Pain and the lack of understanding

How do you explain to the one you love that you cannot feel. That your heart has died and that the anger that rages inside you cannot be quelled. That you do not want to hurt them but you cannot see past the rage in your eyes. You hear those around you talking about happiness and joy, while you can only taste the salty blood of a thousand broken hearts. You want everything to be alright but it is not. You want desperately to see others needs and be what they want.

Hurt and pain are your bedfellows and you know them well, bitterness and rage are your companions, life has dealt a hand unexplainable and you want to be normal, but don't understand what that means. How do you explain to a person who has not experienced the torment that you live why things are the way they are. How do you explain that the holidays are days of sorrow and torment? How?

When no one believes that the man that bore you will actually kill you on sight, how do you explain? When the man who replaced him seems only concerned with judging your wrongs, and although will do much for you, the stark reality is there that you are not accepted. That he does the things he does to make his wife happy. That she does her best to love you, though she hates you for being your father's son, but the reality is there. When you feel in every corner of your soul the fact that you were born to the damned and that those you need to love you cannot accept you. That the game of being normal has gone for so long that you cannot see what real is.

What do you do?

When you know the sociopathy of your father because it courses through your veins. When schizophrenic tendency is your bedfellow, but you can fight. When you have the intellect to understand the depth of all the classics in your palm, but cannot interact with humanity. How do you explain to someone to the point where they understand that you are on the verge of fractured personality, that you know how easy it would be, but wont give in? How do you share these things? How do you explain advanced autistic spectrum disorders? How do you survive in a world that does not understand? And how do you love?

How do you believe in a God that seems not interested in answering your pain? Who comforts you for a moment, but that you cannot seem to follow? When you understand deep issues, but cannot resolve your own depravity, and all those around cannot see the surface of what you comprehend, but can live in death to their passions. Where is the point where suicide no longer is selfish? When it is no longer giving up?

How do you prove you are not a pot made for damnation? How do you accept this fate if it's real? What is the purpose of a life that can only find pain? When you sojourn but only find less hope. How could you give all your trust to people that have no intention of anything but hurt? What do you say to the soul who's whole reality has been destroyed? At what point is it too much? At what point are the lessons learned? What is it that it takes? How do you change what you cannot change? How do you learn to heal? How do you learn to get better?

When you have cried out and cannot find the answers, when you have had the broken and contrite heart only written of, when life has ended and you feel your soul dissolve into the ashes of history, but your brain still functions, you still are walking around among the living but are dead, when nothing will satisfy and nothing heals, when no balm will sooth, no embrace comfort, no words bring anything but anger, what do you say? How can such a soul impart the knowledge of such things to another? How can this soul be mended?

Growth

As we progress through life we learn new things, some things we can impart in others, some are things that half to be learned only through self realization.

Today, my first full day of being 25, I have several hard decisions to make. What friends to I keep, what friends to let go. Do I let people drive wedges between me and other friends? How much should I fight for friendships that are long passing? What do I consider back stabbing and what do I just chalk up to human nature?Do I really want to try at love, or just relax knowing that I am a complete person all on my own? Do I continue the coarse of who I am, or do I allow myself reinvention? Why am I the way I am? Am I really okay with that, or do I think that other people's influence in my life has created reactions that I do not really find desirable?Too long has my life been controlled by learned actions that belong to my parents, family, and friends. Too long have I judged the world and been caught up in desire. Too long has my motivation for action been based on self and what is in my self serving interests. I have to give up the idea that I somehow can control the desires of others, or make them like me. My mind is a continual gong blaring what needs and desires I have. It is in constant want, constantly speaking a need for this and that. No one that has ever seen me would say that I look like I have true material need, but yet the money I make is never enough to get me to the state of pleasure that my mind so knowingly tells me will bring satisfaction. After all what is it worth if an action does not satisfy? If please doesn't bring fulfillment, was it really pleasure? Or a brief lie, cheating us out of satisfaction.We all desire to have companionship, for love, and for balance. Those that are strong, want someone weak, those who are weak want someone strong to take care of them. Why is it that we look for someone to love and balance us, when if we haven't learned to love and balance ourselves, we will only hurt anyone we try to love and balance.And there is a deep fact that we cannot ever truly teach someone else, unless they are moved through life to a point of understanding. We have to have love in and of ourselves, and be balanced as a single person, or we will never be able to balance with someone else. Peace and harmony are two states of being that can only be brought forth by not doing. No desire can thrust you into peace, nor harmony. They can only be achieved through meditation and relaxation. My whole life morality has been a regiment, a coarse of action that I should do in order to be a "good" person. I am beginning to understand morality as something completely different though. What I had previously though was a major downfall, as anytime my desire for pleasure became greater than my dedication to the regiment, I would be in the pitfall of breaking my morals, bringing shame and despair into my life and spiraling into deeper levels of compromise as the desire to not feel so hurt and bad because of my loss of the grip on the regime has caused these compromises.Morality is thus not really a virtue or regiment, but a state of mind and identity. If I identify myself as being a moral person then I will not do something immoral, not because I have chosen not to do it, but because it's not in my nature. Let me use an example:You are walking down the road and you see a car with the back seat filled with presents. No one is around. Do you walk on by or do you smash the window out and take these gifts which will likely be very pleasurable? There are three answers. The first being that you just walk on by and think how lovely it would be to give or receive so many nice things: in this situation your identity is a good moral person. The second being that you smash the window and gleefully go about your day with your new found loot: in this situation you would be identified as a thief. The third option is that you walk by and think how thrilling it might be to snatch away those gifts, you might even look around to see if there really is anyone around, you most likely will keep walking but have the scenario run through your head of taking those presents. Why is it that number 3 didn't take them? The regiment is working. Their desire for thrills hasn't overpowered the virtue of morality. What happens when that person is down on luck and desperate for cash, or food and shelter? disaster.You can change the previous scenario to fit any situation, the answers and results are the same. Frightenly I was among and am still working my way out of category 3. Category 3 is so scary because of the lack on knowing how the person will respond. Category 2 might be deviants, but they are consistent so their actions are predictable.I believe that most Americans fit the category 3 position. And the trend is more and more to a cat 3. It is a problem with loss of identity. All young men in Sparta were warriors, soldiers, defenders of the state. Even against insurmountable odds, being outnumbers beyond number, it was known that they would all fight and die for the state, that was their identity. Our military does it's best to install that same identity into our troops today, for that very reason. Yes, boot-camps are for brainwashing for that very point, to install in them the identity of being warriors, that are not willing to, but just are going to do their duty and lay down their lives without question for the victories of the state.This is where I fell through the cracks in the Marines. I did not take to the identity the way I should have. Something inside me was fractured from long before. Somewhere deep in the foundations of my mind I was completely broken. Several tasks I couldn't accomplish, not because of anything physical, but because of a mental weakness. The full identity did not come to me like it should have. Admittedly the Marines did not make me into a man like they promise. I like a growing many was still a boy, with a job and plenty of money to spend on a economy of diminishing returns. After a period of just over a year after coming out of the military I realized my actions were wrong and that I needed a higher power. I devoted my life back to my religion, and with greater zeal and passion than ever before. I dedicated myself to knowing everything there was to know. I polished my debate skills, and learned to craft scriptures to destroy and harm those that weren't as dedicated as I was to my religion. I became very involved with a small home gathering of young people just like me, dedicated to making themselves as holy as possible to be good enough for God. I was with them for just over a year when I heard about how almost every tradition I had was wrong and came out of paganism. That Jesus had a Hebrew name of Yeshua and that the festivals and the feast days of the old testament were alive and for me today. I left the body I was with, and joined this group of Christians that embraced a "Jewish" way of celebrating. I thought I had it all. I was sooo puffed up with pride, after all I knew so much more than anyone else. I studied away and learned everything I could from anyone who had anything to teach. I trusted like never before and stood by and defended the man who was leading the group, even in the face of loosing most of my friends, who were saying this man wasn't who he said he was.3 weeks after they were banished from the church, a woman with three sons started coming to the church. I had been elevated to position of staff pastor and I could tell she was attracted to me. I started working with her sons and encouraging them. Helped them work through some struggles and they confided in me. By the end of the first month of them being there the senior pastor pulled me into his office to talk about some new gadget he had gotten and wanted my help with. What was really happening was he was playing match maker, and after I aired all my reservations about dating a woman 10 years older than I, with three boys that were 14, 12, and 10. He convinced me that with a wife that was a nurse I could continue my education and she could support me till I was able to take those financial reins. 2 days later I sat down on the couch of my senior pastor's front room and professed my un-dying love for a woman I had barely met, but that I was assured of would be good for me.This wasn't out of my soul. I did not have an un-dying passion for her, or was I really interested in her, other than the fact that she wanted me, and I wanted to be wanted. Somehow a deceived logic had been applied by that pastor that this made sense and would be good for me. It was that same old regiment, I told myself this was the right thing to do. It wasn't my identity, but a self (and outside influenced) virtue bestowed upon me, for the purpose of control. Am I saying I was duped? If so I let it happen, and I am ultimately totally to blame.I will stop the story because this was not meant to be some kind of autobiography or confession, but mealy to illustrate what can happen because we don't have our identity where it should but instead have this regimented set of laws that we choose to obey.So how do you stop without forcing yourself to stop? How do you let go and just let yourself be? How do you become an observer of your own mind and it's vial desire?

If only our leaders were like this

http://easylink.playstream.com/historyplace/thp-rfk-mlk.ra Ladies and Gentlemen - I'm only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening. Because... news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee. Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it's perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black - considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible - you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization - black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love. For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond these rather difficult times. My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black. (Interrupted by applause) So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, yeah that's true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love - a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke. We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We've had difficult times in the past. And we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it's not the end of disorder. But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land. (Interrupted by applause) Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people. Thank you very much. (Applause) Robert F. Kennedy - April 4, 1968