Soar Above The Pain

Comment: The great 13th century Sufi poet Rumi compared emotions like joy, depression, and lowliness to uninvited guests and he recommended to laugh in their face. But we usually behave differently and pretend not to notice them.

However, psychological studies show that accepting negative emotions is a better way to restore and maintain spiritual balance.

My Response: A person is built so that he must balance his negative and positive emotions. If he doesn’t, he will not have an incentive to live.

Question: Suppose I encounter a problem; how should I take it?

Answer: All the same, you will look for the positive side in it. They beat me, but I can breathe between the blows.

Question: This is paradoxical of course, but I would like to ask you about even worse events—a catastrophe, for example.

Answer: Yes. You survive that too.

Question: So, this is called acceptance of the affliction we encounter?

Answer: The trouble comes, and you cannot do anything about it. But still, the instinct of self-preservation forces you to look for something positive in any circumstance you may find yourself in. Otherwise, you will have no incentive to live, and the incentive to live is the most important thing.

Question: What about a person who commits suicide?

Answer: People who end their life by suicide, in principle, have everything. There are people who, compared to those who commit suicide, are really miserable, terribly sick, and have nothing, but are still happy. This is a paradox.

Question: This is indeed a paradox. People commit suicide in Europe, while in Africa hardly any do.

What advice would you give? When trouble comes, a negative situation, how should a person behave?

Answer: He should lower his head, lower his demands, and connect to people like him. Then a person will feel that it is actually in the connection between people that he finds fulfillment and peace of mind and even meaning and purpose in life.

He suddenly begins to understand where this affliction comes from (mind you—he thinks it is a misfortune), and he begins to see that in this affliction, in the lowest state, when he is simply on the ground and cannot raise his head, he begins to understand the meaning, that this is how he is being guided.

He understands that he has been given the opportunity to crawl through such a worm hole to a different state, to a higher state, that is more detached from corporeality, from materialism, and is a more sublime spiritual state.

Question: You have said that this is the state when you start looking for connection with other people?

Answer: Yes. Through them. Or maybe it is inside. This already depends on the root of the soul. He needs to either attain such states through connection with others or individually.

Question: What does a person begin to understand? Where the affliction came from and why?

Answer: He begins to understand the upper providence. And this already opens up for him a totally different attitude to life, inner connection, connection with others. He begins to discover states that are outside of his body.

Question: So, are you saying that only through pain can a person hold on to something that is higher than him, to the Creator?

Answer: That is the only way. It just depends on how you perceive and understand this pain. This pain can be both enjoyable and fulfilling because I know that it detaches me, it scrapes me from this world, like you peel off an adhesive tape, for example. That is how it tears me off, and I stick to a completely different world.
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From KabTV’s “The News with Michael Laitman,” 12/16/20