Good Bad Pain Pleasure

Okay, this is going to get deep.  I was in the hammock earlier, doing what I do, and had to grab a pen and paper to jot down some thoughts.  Here are some of them:

Perhaps there is no good or bad, pain or pleasure.  I am beginning to consider the possibility that nobody is actually suffering, as the Buddhists might have you believe, but instead everyone just THINKS they're suffering.  If you can get rid of thinking, you just are.  You may be hurt, you may be tortured, you may be broken hearted, but only thinking that you are actually something other than the universe leads to the belief that you are suffering.  The universe just is.  If you can recognize that you are part of the universe, an infinitesimally small part of the universe, the suffering that you feel all of the sudden becomes part of the whole, which just is.  

Let's come at it from a different perspective.  There is no good or bad, only thinking makes it so.  I mentioned in some blog earlier how small our perspective is of the universe.  We make judgements on whether something is good or bad while only knowing an infinitesimally small portion of the whole, an infinitesimally small portion of the effects of any one event.  As your perspective gets wider and wider, you are able to see that in every "bad" event, there are what your brain might consider wonderful consequences, and in every "good" even, there are absolutely horrible consequences.  And if you examine all you actually know, you will find that the path you are able to follow, with all of the influences, is ridiculously small.  Even to the second OF the event, taking time out of the picture, you know nothing about the particular event in the grand scheme of the universe.  All you know is the tiny piece you think you see.  

Perhaps the universe just is.  And as we take every person, action, breath, and see that it has an effect on every single part of that universe, we realize that it's all just one.  The universe is all just one.  And segmenting it into tiny parts is what causes us to believe things are good or bad. Cutting it up into what we think or perceive creates an illusion of this dichotomy.  And when our brain separates us from the universe, we create an illusion of pain and pleasure within ourselves, instead of just seeing that it all is just a tiny part of our whole being, which is the universe.  We are all the universe.  Not part of it, we ARE it.  

Tolle at one point in some book mentioned that he found that when he felt physical pain in some part of his body, if he perceived that physical pain throughout his whole body it diminished the pain.  Try it.  I did, and found the same.  If I feel the pain in my shoulder not as a pain in my shoulder, but as pain in a very small part of my body as a whole, then it becomes not so bad, it's just a little tiny part of the whole.  Imagine if we could do this and see the pain as a pain in a small body part in a much larger body in a much larger family in a much larger society in a much larger world in a much larger universe!  And it's not just physical.  We can do it with everything.  This is not a good or bad feeling, not pain or pleasure, it's just part of the universe.  It just IS the universe.  And the universe just is.