Questioner: The present moment is sometimes unacceptable, unpleasant, or awful.
Eckhart Tolle: It is as it is.

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“The sense that things should be other than they are, is suffering.”
--Wayne Liquorman

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"Life is suffering.”
--Buddha


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Since the start of war in Ukraine, many more folks than usual are looking to understand that age-old question...

How can there be so much pain in this world? How can there be so much wrongness, so much suffering?

After all, suffering is bad. Blood, screams, torture- bad. Dead expectant mothers, dead newborns, dead families trying to escape- bad.

A good life does not include pain and most certainly does not include bombs.

We know this. It simply should not be this way.

Why not?

Well, I mean, because we don’t like it. Because anguish doesn’t feel good.

Y’know, to us.

Turns out, how-things-are-supposed-to-be is determined by each individual human, what we each believe is right and wrong,

And whether we like what’s happening.

Don’t like= Shouldn’t happen. Do like = Yes please, more of that.

We judge what’s acceptable and reject whatever isn’t liked.

So then there’s the unliked happening, as well as unliked feelings ABOUT the happening, and also the vague unspoken sense that we have no business adjudicating right and wrong, even if it’s just to ourselves.

All this comes down to a point of view, a perspective, which is entirely human-centric.

And Me-centric. Self-centric.

As in, centered around the self.

There’s the self- aka us, the evaluators- and then there’s everything else- that which we’re evaluating.

Which is outside of us.

Suffering happens to us. Pain is forced on us.

We are continually enduring unwanted, outside-us, happenings.

Confirming that we are separate from, and outside of, experience.

Reified. Distinct. Individual.

Although this is the opposite of, There’s only one. This is the opposite of, Allowing everything to be as it is. This is the opposite of, This is it.

Hmmm.

Could it be there is another point of view than the limited human perspective?

Because all we have to do is look around for a half a moment and it starts to seem patently obvious that existence/consciousness/god/awareness/source/the infinite (pick your name of choice) likes it just like this, wants it all, relishes it all, revels in it all.

Including suffering, blood, agony, death, bombs, war, and injustice.

So I wonder what would happen to our solidified likes and dislikes and dread upon seeing today’s news, if we could play with BEING those experiences.

What if we could try on being the scream, being the explosion, being the blood and the color red?

What if what we are is literally every pain, every sensation, every sound, every thought and feeling?

Rather than an outsider who is forced to experience unwanted, separate-from-self, happenings. Rather than a solid, separate, feeler, thinker, disapprover, accepter, and evaluator to whom things happen.

Who knows, we might begin to notice how very, very different every experience becomes,

when it’s what we are.

We might even discover an as-yet unseen beauty in pain, in screams, in dislike.

Does this change the world?  

No.

Does it eliminate suffering (a suffering consciousness has so clearly enjoyed for thousands if not millions of years?)

No.

OK then, does it make us like everything that happens?

No.

But it does make us actually, literally, all that happens.

Which is pretty neat.

And then there’s not two.

There’s ONLY-ONE.

And we are that one.

And that one

is us.


"All is just as it should be, right now. Not because it is a potential for something better, but because all that is, is divine expression.
All appearance is source. All that apparently manifests—the world, the life story, the hypnotic dream of separation, the search for home, is the one appearing as two, the nothing appearing as everything, the absolute appearing as the particular.

We are the dreamers in this dream,
The source of the hidden principle is ourselves, and it is fired by our longing to come home."
--Tony Parsons

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""The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don’t mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don’t mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don’t sing
all the time"
--Lawrence Ferlinghetti


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