Embracing Pain and Wearing your Battle Scars

 

“You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers ”  The Fault in our Stars

I came across an old poem of mine about my scars / pain that I was going through at the time and realized how stupendously self absorbed I was. Ah… the beauty of youth when you think you have it all figured it out. But it got me think of the subject of tests…

A friend of mine once told me that some tests are ones that we choose for it to happen, and there are those that happen because we need to grow. I wonder how he feells about this now, when he has such tests that he is in a wheelchair and half paralyzed with AIDS even though he is still relatively young.

Some sadness never leaves us. Some scars we will never truly recover from, and lay a heavy burden on our hearts.   There are cuts too deep to ever fully heal from. At times, like tonight they feel anew, and at others you feel saddened from a distance like watching a scene unfold that you wish went differently.

” Pain is like fabric. The stronger it is. The more it’s worth”. The Fault in our Stars

But sometimes we can get so caught up in our own version of sadness that we do not realize that out there, millions of people are suffering similar things.  We are not unique in our scars. Everybody hurts, even if it doesn’t feel that way. Instead, we put on a brave face to the world,  put on our masks to be accepted into society. We say, we’re o.k. and no one bothers to find out if it’s true because they too are wrapped up in their own pain.

And that pain, because a thing in of itself  a festering cancer which eats us up for awhile.  Or it can simply be buried so deep that you will only let it out on random occasions and it cuts so deep that people get scared by the ferocity of it’s pain.

No, we choose not to learn from the test. We become bitter, entrenched in our own case of sadness. We lock in ourselves and mistrust anything that comes along. We choose to believe in darkness . We can see darkness, we can taste it. But light? That require faith. That requires a will to get up and be brave.

It requires looking beyond yourself, and trying to serve others. Because if we did, if we got of our own head space we realized we weren’t that alone and we weren’t that different. And then we would channel that pain into learning, we would try to make and create an experience. If we are brave, we could realize that those scars , those scars are swords to make us who we are today. If we took it on ourselves to shine bright, to dream big to find beauty.  We wouldn’t let it win. Because our worst enemies? It isn’t those around us, it’s ourselves. 

 

i can see her clearly now
her voice echoed in cobwebs
A distant figure
blurred within time

a silhouette in a moon tinted beach
she comes to me in dreams
her eyes swallowed by goblins
There is something skitterish in her eyes

as her mouth overflows with snakes

Her chestnut brown hair ensared
Like children caught in cobwebs
her smile is pasted on carefully
Pieces that don't seem to fit quite right

She echoes softly to the moonlight
Making sure the rivers don't see her tears
Her eyes caress
Moon tinted beaches

She does not live in this world
But lives in glass and crystal

she echoes softly to the moonlight

so the rivers dont see her tears

her vest is open exposing her white lacy bra

but she is unaware of any sexuality

i see her eyes

carresss blue tinted skies

she does not live in this world
but one of glass and crystal
walking midnight gardens of jasmine

while black silhouettes wait for the darkness to 
descend quietly on circles i her eyes
her venus body creeping those horizons she is beautiful  lips

and bright smiles
but she doesn’t see it
her voice overflowing with rainbow



her arms cover from the storms of insults

ugly fat stupid clumsy...

she hovers in corners
and doesnt see the swords poking her back pocket
or the steel breast stitched to her side

 Blinded to  the light pouring out at her fingertips
she has no concept of evil
she lets the bruises descend on her once untouched ski

as they become scars

 she lets the words swallow her beauty
she lets them take away her rainbow words
and stow away her magic in ugly tinted jars
as she decides to die in gray twilight

 dear child
didnt u believe in the pumpkin?
she looks at me now

trying for me to forgive
the ghost i see before me
the rolls of fat that spill out
vanished beauty
but i am stronger now
i wouldnt want to take her back
there is a strange beauty
in imperfection

( poem written at age 18.... not sure if I have the same perspective now   
I love this quote from Abdul Baha about suffering :

 ”The mind and spirit of man advance when he is tried by suffering. The more the ground is ploughed the better the seed will grow, the better the harvest will be. Just as the plough furrows the earth deeply, purifying it of weeds and thistles, so suffering and tribulation free man from the petty affairs of this worldly life until he arrives at a state of complete detachment. His attitude in this world will be that of divine happiness. Man is, so to speak, unripe: the heat of the fire of suffering will mature him. Look back to the times past and you will find that the greatest men have suffered most.”

 

Reexamining the Paradigm Shift of Religion and Science

The only way we can possibly all come together is by changing our current concepts of how we see the world. The time has come to break paradigms , and to redefine our current definitions of things are.  We need to have a serious paradigm shift in order for anything to get done.

What the heck is a paradigm anyway?  It describes distinct concepts or thought patterns in any scientific discipline or other epistemological context. ( According to wikipedia ). What it basically means is that we have certain concepts that we all have that we believe to be truths, and we stick to it until something comes along to challenge that paradigm and we adopt new ones. What makes it dangerous is how defines how we see the world, and our behavior as well. While we are not conscious of it, it is how we define a known reality. Paradigms are a bit like an internet meme, it spreads like wildfire without really having a clear idea how it started. In this day and age, we just naturally take things on as truth without knowing necessarily WHY  this is the case.

But paradigms does not have to contain truth, they are merely a way or a tool for us to make sense of the world. And our current paradigms are seriously messing with our heads. Our concept of religion, spirituality, men and women, education , relationships,etc are all following dated paradigms which I believe no longer work.  In the next couple of posts I am going to explain this a bit further ( or more like explain what I have learned from other people haha)

There is a reason why we live our lives in constant contradiction and fragmentation.  Our values at work, in how we treat others, in the world around us is consistently clashing, and this drives us to be a little like this :

 

How we choose a paradigm is sometimes arbitrary

A theory is tested, people adopt it and then consider it to be truth. Usually, though, it has more to do with the fact that it is what the majority believes than anything logical. In the advent of pseudo science this becomes even more evident. We follow a paradigm merely on the assumption that ” medical experts say so” . We believe science to be infallible and the truth. Actually, science has a lot to do with faith and has elements in common with religion.
Within our society, we think of certain concepts with a certain defnition, and a lot of times it is based on a historical assumption that this is how we should see things. However, perception is a tricky thing and at times how we define things might differ from one person to the next even if the ” concept” is clear to us.
Let’s take a very controversial topic : religion.

For Atheists : Religion is something that has caused great harm to our society, and has given way for men to force their views on others, wars, adopting falsehood and superstition, among other things.

If you consider their point of view, it’s not exactly wrong. In the name of religion , people have caused great harm and corruption. But was it really religion or the men behind it? I highly doubt that the Manifestations of God advocated superstition over investigating the truth, war and hate over love and service. All of them lead Their lives dedicated to others.

Religion, like science , is not static, but changes with action and reflection evolving constantly over time. The basis of it will remain the same, just as there are scientific principles which do not change however become sophisticated over time through investigation as does religion.

And what is spirituality? Spirituality adheres to a core belief that we all have virtues inside us. They are not material, we cannot bottle them but they are vital for our growth as human beings . When we increase our capacity to love others, others benefit and grow with this. When we increase our intellectual abilities with a desire to care for others, it has positive instead of detrimental effects in us.

When we think that we have a spiritual side, we will exploit those basic core values. Laughter, happiness, strength of love , generosity are all spiritual in nature. But this is not a spirituality that sits down and meditates all day without taking action. It is through going to serve others in some way that we increase our spiritual nature. It is by giving up our self to the benefit of others. By tossing aside the competitive nature so plagued by our current society we can progress spiritually. By deepening on what

I give this example but there are thousands more… we need to believe that our current notion of certain core concepts in our lives need to be redefined. There are basic parts of our lives that follow a broken model. Our concept of what family means, what religion is about, our concept of spirituality and the meaning of our lives. We blindly follow a set of archaic rules which no longer have any reason for being so. We need to start questioning why we do the things we do. We are living our lives surrounded by dichotomies , and it causes us to have split personalities. We need to have some balance in our lives. What’s true is that we need to grow as a society, and try to do it together by sharing our common beliefs and virtues.