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Word Gems
Suffering
Aeschylus
The Lament, Edward Burne-Jones
Dr. Leslie Weatherhead: Why Do Men Suffer? Dr. W. R. Maltby: each of us "bears the sins of the world" Fr. Walter Ciszek: He Leadeth Me: 23 years in Soviet prisons Dr. Frank Oski, professor of pediatrics: on the suffering and death of children Personal Statement #3: An Introduction to The Scientific Evidence for The AfterLife: "I'm not allowed to tell you too much about what it's like over here, because some of you might try to end your mortal lives just to get here a little faster" Personal Statement #28: Love In The AfterLife: The Perfect Storm of Ultimate Human Suffering: Exploring Cosmic Meaning in Separation from a Soulmate Lover: Making Your Music Pure Personal Statement #30: Anger: the Soul's Blinding, the Ego's Cry of Resistance: How We Fail to Recognize the Loves of Our Lives: My Friendship with Carolyn Kuhn Sperle Personal Statement #31: Finding Healing From Religious Abuse: The Nature of Authentic Spiritual Authority: What I Learned From Father John Kuhn Personal Statement #33: Love In The AfterLife: The Story of The Fish and The Crab: Twin-Soul Love and The Purging Fire: Freedom, Only In This Case, I Covet Not: Loving According To Each Other's Liking Personal Statement #34: What You Need To Know Before You Die: How Your Religious Beliefs Can Hurt You For Hundreds Of Years To Come: How I Helped A Departed Relative, Trapped In Fears Of Judgment, To Go To The Light Personal Statement #36: The Death of The Great False Self: Nothing Left To Lose After Losing You: Developing Your Psychic Abilities, Understanding Mysteries, Becoming Love Itself Personal Statement #42: The Fear of Death and the Meaning of Judgment in the AfterLife: We Cannot Escape our Responsibility to Unfold the Spirit, to Evolve as a Soul, to Love Ourselves! I'm not afraid of dying, but I am afraid of losing you! Personal Statement #46: Love In The AfterLife: Romance at the Pinnacle of Existence! The Ultimate Dualistic-Halves of Eternal Twin-Soul Love! Why Your Deepest Yearning is the Voice of the Universe Proclaiming Its Truest Cosmic Message! I will love no other! no other! Personal Statement #63: Love In The AfterLife: Summerland: Where Dreams Come True, Part II: How You Will Yet Find Healing from the Devastating Losses of this World! Long, long shall I rue thee, too deeply to tell Personal Statement #66: Imprimatur! Let it be printed! A Priest Speaks Out from The AfterLife! The Testimony of Father Robert Benson Personal Statement #67: The Nature of Evil! Would you recognize it if you met, on the street, or in the mirror?
John Keats: "Call the world if you please, 'the Vale of Soul Making,' then you will find out the use of the world." Walter M. Miller, A Canticle For Leibowitz: "Why don't you forgive God for allowing pain? If He didn't allow it, human courage, bravery, nobility, and self-sacrifice would all be meaningless things." H. G. Wells, The Time Machine: "I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes - to come to this at last... absolute safety... And a great quiet had followed." Observations of The Time Traveler regarding the mankind of A.D. 800,000 which had apparently succeeded in removing all risk and danger from life. Richard Bach: "What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly." Buckminster Fuller: "There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly."
Editor's note: See myPersonal Statement #28: Love In The AfterLife: The Perfect Storm of Ultimate Human Suffering: Exploring Cosmic Meaning in Separation from a Soulmate Lover: Making Your Music Pure
Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning: "I had wanted simply to convey to the reader by way of concrete example that life holds a potential meaning under any conditions, even the most miserable ones. And I thought that if the point were demonstrated in a situation as extreme as that in a concentration camp, my book might gain a hearing. I therefore felt responsible for writing down what I had gone through, for I thought it might be helpful to people who are prone to despair." Even in the degradation and misery of a concentration camp, Frankl was able to exercise the most important freedom of all -- the freedom to determine one's own attitude and spiritual well-being. No Nazi guard was able to control the inner-life of Frankl's soul. Also, he witnessed that those who had nothing to live for died most quickly.
Abraham Lincoln Consoles Mrs. Lydia Bixby regarding her loss of five sons:
Aeschylus, Agamemnon: "Zeus has led us on to know, the Helmsmen lays it down as law that we must suffer, suffer into truth." Charles de Foucauld: "Our difficulties are not a transitory state of affairs... No, they are the normal state of affairs and we should reckon on being angustia temporum ['in straightness of times,' Dan. 9:21] all our lives, so far as the good we want to do is concerned." C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves: "We were made for God... By loving Him more than [our loved ones] we shall love them more than we now [in this life] do. But all that is far away in 'the land of the Trinity,' not here in exile, in the weeping valley. Down here it is all loss and renunciation.The very purpose of the bereavement ... may have been to force this upon us [i.e. that we were made for God]. We are then compelled to try to believe, what we cannot yet feel, that God is our true Beloved." Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place, 30 years after her ordeal in a Nazi death camp, offers her thoughts on the purpose of suffering: "Some questions remain -- but they are not to be feared. Our Heavenly Father holds all things in his hands, even our questions... No pit is so deep that He is not deeper still. With Jesus -- even in our darkest moments -- the best remains, and the very best is yet to be." Unknown: "A diamond is all the more brilliant against a backdrop of black." Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Reminiscences: "Never in history had a nation and its people been more completely crushed than were the Japanese people... Their entire faith in the Japanese way of life ... perished in the agony of their total defeat... It left a complete vacuum, morally, mentally, and physically. And into this vacuum flowed the democratic way of life." Lessons from the book of Job, from the notes of Malcolm Smith: Job did not curse God when his troubles began, even said God could do more to him.Though Job did not understand much of what was happening, he believed God to be righteous, that He would have a good reason for allowing calamities. In suffering we can affirm the goodness, the righteousness of God. We show that we do not serve God merely for the "hedge," as Satan claimed. We give glory to God in our suffering by praising him. God could have created our world differently.The fact that he did not suggests that there is no other way consistent with our long term good. "Does Job serve God for nothing?" Satan’s sneer at the story’s beginning is the key question of the entire book. Satan implied that we "love" God only because he gives many good things, a kind of bribery. God asked Job and the three friends many questions as if to say, "If you can’t understand how I manage the physical creation, why do you think that you could understand the spiritual realm? Creating the stars was the easy part, I spoke them into existence. Preparing man for eternity is something else." Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: “What does not destroy me makes me stronger.” Winston Churchill: “If you're going through hell, keep going.” Paula Poundstone: "The wages of sin are death; but by the time taxes are taken out, it's just sort of a bad feeling." Eric Hoffer: "Not actual suffering but the hope of better things incites people to revolt." Dinah Shore: "Trouble is part of your life, and if you don't share it, you don't give the person who loves you a chance to love you enough." Mark Twain, from his notebook: "If I were going to construct a God I would furnish Him with some ways and qualities and characteristics which the Present (Bible) One lacks.... He would spend some of His eternities in trying to forgive Himself for making man unhappy when He could have made him happy with the same effort and He would spend the rest of them in studying astronomy." Greek proverb: "It is not good for all our wishes to be filled; through sickness we recognize the value of health; through evil, the value of good; through hunger, the value of food; through exertion, the value of rest." John Tillotson: "Though all afflictions are evils in themselves, yet they are good for us, because they discover to us our disease and tend to our cure." C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain: The problem of pain defined: "If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty, He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both." This is the problem of pain, in its simplest form. The possibility of answering it depends on showing that the terms 'good' and 'almighty,' and perhaps also the term 'happy' are equivocal: for it must be admitted from the outset that if the popular meanings attached to these words are the best, or the only possible, meanings, then the argument is unanswerable." C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain: "No doubt Pain as God's megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul. If the first and lowest operation of pain shatters the illusion that all is well, the second shatters the illusion that what we have, whether good or bad in itself, is our own and enough for us. Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us. We 'have all we want' is a terrible saying when 'all' does not include God. We find God an interruption. As St. Augustine says somewhere, 'God wants to give us something, but cannot, because our hands are full--there's nowhere for Him to put it.' Or as a friend of mine said, 'We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it's there for emergencies but he hopes he'll never have to use it.' Now God who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him. Yet we will not seek it in Him as long as He leaves us any other resort where it can even plausibly be looked for. While what we call 'our own life' remains agreeable we will not surrender it to Him. What then can God do in our interests but make 'our own life' less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness? It is just here, where God's providence seems at first to be most cruel, that the Divine humility, the stooping down of the highest , most deserves praise. We are perplexed to see misfortune falling upon decent, inoffensive, worthy people--on capable, hard-working mothers of families or diligent, thrifty little trades-people on those who have worked so hard, and so honestly, for their modest stock of happiness and now seem to be entering on the enjoyment of it with the fullest right.... Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for the moment, that God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed: that all this must fall from them in the end, and that if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. The life to themselves and their families stands between them and the recognition of their need; He makes that life less sweet to them." Leslie Weatherhead, The Christian Agnostic: "While this is not yet the best of all possible worlds, it may be the world of best possibilities... It is impossible for us at our infant stage of development to get the suffering of the world-which has made so many men disbelieve in God-into the right proportion. I have sometimes imagined a mass meeting of toddlers with a chairman aged five. I imagine an angry discussion in which speakers prove that there cannot be love at the heart of their homes. It is alleged by one speaker after another that parents allow the existence of cats with sharp claws, furniture and dinner knives with sharp edges, paths covered with sharp gravel. How can love be said to rule when a toddler is put into a home situation carrying so many evidences that either parents don't care or they have no power to alter things? 'Look at my cut knees,' says the chairman, adjusting his bib. 'Look at the scratch on my hand, and I only meant to play with the cat'! In exactly this spirit, believing himself to have grown up, Richard Robinson writes, 'A god who was all-powerful but left much misery in the world would not be all-benevolent. An all benevolent god in a world containing much misery would not be an all-powerful god. A world containing a god who was both all-powerful and all-benevolent would contain no misery. Here, then, we have a mathematical proof bearing on a common religious doctrine. Anyone who is confident that he frequently came across misery in the world may conclude with equal confidence that there is no such thing as an all-powerful and all-benevolent god. And this mathematically disposes of official Christianity." Exit Christianity!! I must remind Mr. Robinson, in familiar words, that the Christian religion is 'an anvil which has broken many hammers' and his so-called 'mathematical proof' is inadequate to banish the faith of a believer, even when he suffers. I believe that one day we shall view the suffering that now appalls us, as now we view the sufferings of our childhood." Channing: "Even in evil, that dark cloud which hands over the creation, we discern rays of light and hope, and gradually come to see, in suffering and temptation, proofs and instruments of the sublimest purposes of wisdom and love." Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter: "There was no other attribute that so much impressed her with a sense of new and untransmitted vigour in Pearl's nature, as this never failing vivacity of spirits... It was certainly a doubtful charm, imparting a hard, metallic lustre to the child's character. She wanted -- what some people want throughout life -- a grief that should deeply touch her, and thus humanise and make her capable of sympathy. But there was time enough yet for little Pearl." W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965): "To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all of the miseries of life."
Wyatt Earp, the movie: Rescuing his son from depression and drunkeness, Wyatt's father speaks about the untimely death of Wyatt's young wife: "Do you think that you're the first man to lose someone? That's what life is all about - loss!"
Muhammad Ali, after his defeat by Leon Spinks, Feb. 17, 1978 (a fight, purportedly, the inspiration for the movie, Rocky): "We all lose in life. You lose your wife, you lose your mother. We all have losses, and what you have to do is keep living, overcome those losses and come back. You can't just go and die because you lose... Of all the fights I lost, losing to Spinks hurt the most. That's because it was my fault... I didn't train right." Hermann Hesse: "You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation... and that is called loving. Well, then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is your aversion that hurts, nothing else." John 13: 31, 34, Authorized Version: "When [Judas] was gone out, Jesus said, Now is the Son of Man glorified... love one another, as I have loved you." I Peter 2: 23, 24; 4: 19, J.B. Phillips translation: "... when [Jesus] was insulted he offered no insult in return. When he suffered he made no threats of revenge. He simply committed his cause to the One who judges fairly... those who suffer ... can safely commit their souls to their faithful Creator, and go on doing all the good they can."
This colorful image [left] from the
Hubble Space Telescope shows the collision of two gases near a dying
star 450 light-years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius.
Astronomers have dubbed the tadpole-like objects [enlargement on the
right] "cometary knots" because their glowing heads and gossamer
tails resemble comets. Each gaseous head is at
least twice the size of our solar system; each tail stretches 100
billion miles, about 1,000 times the Earth's distance to the
Sun. Astronomers theorize that the gaseous "heads" are the results
of a collision between gases. The doomed star spews the hot gas from
its surface, which collides with the cooler gas that it had ejected
10,000 years before. (This image was taken in August, 1994 with
Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2.)
Sir Oliver Lodge, Raymond: Sir Oliver Lodge, one of the most famous British scientists of the early 20th century, lost his son Raymond during WWI. Lodge devoted much of his remaining years to the study of the afterlife. The following quote is seance-testimony from one on the Other Side: "I lived a selfish life: a good life, but a selfish one, though I didn't know it then. I isolated myself and did not mix with people, not even with family life. When I go over, I find it was a negative goodness, so then I wanted to help humanity, because I hadn't helped it. I had not taken on the sufferings even of a family man. It was useless. And so that is why I came back to ... try to bear through him the sorrows of the world. It is through suffering that humanity is helped. That is one great thing... the sacrifice of Jesus. He demonstrated eternity, but to do it He must be sacrificed and taste death. So all who teach the high ... must tread the same path; there's no escaping the crucifixion, it comes in one way or another...Out of it will come much joy, much happiness to others." Sir Oliver Lodge, Raymond: "The
Christian conception; not of a God apart from His creatures, looking
on, taking no personal interest in their behaviour, sitting aloof
only to judge them; but One who anxiously takes measures for their
betterment, takes trouble, takes pains--a pregnant phrase, takes
pains--One who suffers when they go wrong, One who feels painfully
the miseries and wrongdoings and sins and cruelties of the creatures
whom He has endowed with free will; One who actively enters into the
storm and the conflict; One who actually took flesh and dwelt among
us, to save us from the slough into which we might have fallen, to
show us what the beauty and dignity of man might be." Zoroaster: "Thus spoke the Devil to me once, Even God has his hell: it is his love for man." Aeschylus (525-456 BC), Agamemnon 179-183: "He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God." Aeschylus: "There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief." Dr. Leslie Weatherhead, His Life and Ours: "I believe most assuredly that either on this side of death or the other there will come to every human spirit an hour when God calls up all the resources of the personality; assets which He has been guarding jealously all the years; when everything suffered, everything borne, everything overcome, every talent, every bit of character, everything we now dream we might become, will be used, mobilised and dedicated to some high purpose, a purpose which is the only reason why we ever emerged from that infinite source of personality from which, by the method of human birth, we were drawn as water from a well." Silver Birch: "The Great Spirit is infinite love and nothing happens in the whole universe without His knowledge. All suffering automatically brings its own reward because it touches the soul and, in doing so, gives it a greater awareness of the higher, deeper and more profound aspects of the universe... Your world does not understand the function of pain and suffering and difficulty and hardship, but all these play an important part in the evolution of the human spirit. Look back in your own lives and see that often the greatest crises, the difficult problems, the darkest hours, were the stepping stones that led to greater understanding. You would not evolve if forever you dwelt in the sunshine, lived free from care, anxiety and worry, where every approaching difficulty was automatically smoothed out so that it never touched you, where there were no rough stones for your pathway, where there was nothing for you to conquer. It is in the facing of, and rising supreme over, trouble that you grow... In the great universe where harmony is the law, each one of you contributes to the plan. The events in your lives, sometimes of bitterness and despair, of pain and misery, all play their part in preparing the soul gradually for the path that is being trodden... The darkness and the light, the shadow and sunshine, are all but reflections of one whole. Without shadow there could be no light and without light there could be no shadow. The difficulties of life are steps which enable the soul to rise. Difficulties, obstacles, handicaps -- these are the trials of the soul. And when it conquers them all, it rises stronger, more purified, deepened in intensity and more highly evolved. Do you think that the latent powers of the soul, infinite in their possibilities of expression, could realize themselves without difficulty and pain, without shadow, without sorrow, and without suffering and misery? Of course not. The joy and the laughter can only be enjoyed to the full when once you have drained the cup of sorrow to the dregs, for as low as you can fall in the scale of life so correspondingly you can rise. The more you have tasted and experienced that which seems the shadow of earthly life, the more you will appreciate, because of it, the greater joys of the sunshine. Your experiences are all part of your evolution. One day, freed from the trammels of flesh, with eyes not clouded by matter, you will look back in retrospect and view the life you have lived on earth. And out of the jigsaw of all the events, you will see how every piece fits into its allotted place, how every experience was a lesson to quicken the soul and to enable it to have greater understanding of its possibilities. There is no experience that comes to the human soul, which, rightly understood and rightly faced, does not leave you better for it. Can you contemplate a world of matter where there were no difficulties, no trials, no troubles, no pain, no suffering? There would be no evolution. There would be nothing to surmount. You would decay." The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, the movie: Frodo: "I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened." Gandalf: "So do all who live to see such times -- but that is not for them to decide; all you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you." Anne Spencer Morrow Lindbergh: "I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable." Sir Oliver Lodge, Raymond: "The Universe is a flux, it is a becoming, it is a progress. Evolution is a reality. True and not imaginary progress is possible. Effort is not a sham. Existence is a true adventure. There is a real risk. There was a real risk about creation--directly it went beyond the inert and mechanical. The granting of choice and free will involved a risk. Thenceforward things could go wrong. They might be kept right by main force, but that would not be playing the game, that would not be loyalty to the conditions. As William James says: A football team desires to get a ball to a certain spot, but that is not all they desire; they wish to do it under certain conditions and overcome inherent difficulties -- else might they get up in the night and put it there. So also we may say, Good is the end and aim of the Divine Being; but not without conditions. Not by compulsion. Perfection as of machinery would be too dull and low an achievement -- something much higher is sought. The creation of free creatures who, in so far as they go right, do so because they will, not because they must -- that was the Divine problem, and it is the highest of which we have any conception. Yes, there was a real risk in making a human race on this planet. Ultimate good was not guaranteed. Some parts of the Universe must be far better than this, but some may be worse. Some planets may comparatively fail. The power of evil may here and there get the upper hand: although it must ultimately lead to suicidal destructive failure, for evil is pregnant with calamity."
Ground Zero
Jim Croce, Tomorrow's Gonna Be A Brighter Day: "... nobody ever had a rainbow, Baby, until he had the rain..." John Overton Choules, August 12, 1843: "The glories of Christianity in England are to be traced in the sufferings of confessors and martyrs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and it was under the influence of Christian principles, imbibed at this very period, that the Mayflower brought over the band of Pilgrims to Plymouth... We should never forget that the prison, the scaffold, and the stake were stages in the march of civil and religious liberty which our forefathers had to travel, in order that we might attain our present liberty." Ann Landers: "The poor wish to rich; the rich wish to be happy; the single wish to be married; and the married wish to be dead." The Association, Cherish: "...you don't know how many times I wish that I had told you..." William Butler Yeats: "But O that I were young again And held her in my arms!" Gary McClain, Idiot's Guide to Zen Living: "Dukkha is the Sanskrit word for suffering or, more generally, that deep feeling of discontent, dissatisfaction, restlessness, unfulfilled desire and want that so often characterizes human existence... Suffering is caused by desire. Desire is wanting something you don't have... [Enlightenment reduces suffering by reducing desire; this comes about by a realization that we, within ourselves, already have a measure of important things.] Dukkha isn't easy to ignore. It keeps hounding us, following us around like a stray dog [Why are certain feelings of suffering so strong? Because the precipitating suffering-event seemed to be such a large loss to you] ... Dukkha makes us misperceive reality. We get so caught up in our own heads that we have no idea what is really going on. [We imagine things, we feel threatened unnecessarily, causing us to be angry and depressed.] ... To live means to experience suffering ... So you have to be alone because your marriage didn't work ... So you have to exchange information with the person whose car you just hit. Nobody likes these things ... Being human means experiencing unpleasantness. How you handle these bad things (bad being a relative term) is what causes your suffering, not the bad thing itself... Let the [suffering] go. This means waking up to your life and true nature again and again and again, as many times as it takes. The better you become at foiling dukkha and living by dharma [reality], or the truth of your own nature, the more glimmers [of what's real] you'll get... [Suffering needs to be seen as something separate from one's true self. When we are hurting we should acknowledge dukkha, but then let it go. We should say: 'There's that dukkha feeling again' as we acknowledge that suffering is normal for all of us -- but it doesn't have to overcome us.]" Editor's note: The sense of detachment engendered by suffering is well expressed in the inscription on Kazantzakis' tomb in Heraklion, Greece: "I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free." Louise Bogan: "I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!" Geri Larkin, Stumbling Toward Enlightenment: "Just when we start to be able to see clearly ... we discover that behind our anger -- which we thought we had faced just fine, thank you very much - is rage... So let go of your rage... Forgive.... Let your own inherent gentleness free you."
Jose Feliciano, The Last Thing On My Mind:
Laurel Duran, NDE reporter: “What I experienced was a complete union with God - complete, unconditional love,” she said. “All of the burdens I had on Earth dissolved into nothing... Everything that happens during our life on Earth is purposeful ... not random.” Barry & Robin Gibb, How Do You Mend A Broken Heart?: "...I could never see tomorrow, but I was never told about the sorrow..." Helen Reddy, I Am Woman: "Oh, yes, I am wise, But it's wisdom born of pain, Yes, I've paid the price, But look how much I gained -- If I have to, I can do anything..." Arthur Miller, The Ride Down Mount Morgan: "Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets."
Hank Williams, I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry:
Gordon Lightfoot, Rainy Day People:
M. Scott Peck: "The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers." John Adams: “My daughter [marrying unwisely] and Charles [his son, suffering from alcoholism] bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to the grave. The daughter, without a fault. Unfortunate daughter! Unhappy child!” Frederic W. H. Myers, Vanishing Night, transmitted to Juliet S. Goodenow, 1923: "It is not so much what you will find when you come to this side of life as what you will bring with you... Sleep is the best definition of death I know anything about -- just going to sleep unafraid to awake in a new and beautiful room, and to be satisfied. This is all there is... [On Earth] you are the apprentice to your own soul. Here you are the promoted individual... Bring all of your soul treasures -- you will need them, your culture, your love of art, of music -- all this you will use... Every want shall be satisfied. Material possessions you will not need... We are undisguised, for on our foreheads is the insignia of whatever we have gained in culture, love for humanity, charity, selflessness, energy and force, ambitions for the sake of others -- all this is here waiting for us when we are given ... our Price, our Wage, whatever we have earned during our years of apprenticeship."
Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning: Recounting an Auschwitz experience: "We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, along the one road running through the camp. The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles... But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look... for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when a man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way - an honorable way - in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment... I resumed talk with my loved one: I asked her questions, and she answered; she questioned me in return, and I answered." [Frankl would later discover that his beloved, at this point, had already been killed in the death camps.] Robert Schwartz, Courageous Souls: "Though these roles were chosen and agreed upon before birth, the enactment of the plan still creates painful feelings of loss... As the spirit guides advised [one who had lost a loved one], 'say I'm going to cry until I have no more tears. Then cry some more.' The guides know that pain suppressed is pain unhealed." Kelly Pavese: REGRET Regret is stifling, a killing of
soul
Herman's Hermits, Silhouettes On The Shade
6-21-10: The wisdom of Spirit often speaks to us in unpredictable, unorthodox, but artful, even, synchronistic, ways - such are the sublime teaching devices of the Troubadours (P.S. #37). For a long time, I've liked Peter Noone's voice of melodic pureness, and his efforts here; but, strangely, even when I was a young teen - that dark time for me, without prom-attendance, without girlfriend, "without pink carnation, but with a pickup truck" (P.S. #33) - this song would immediately send me into severe emotional downward spiral; unremittingly, it still does. Sometimes, even children can sense a foreshadowing, a certain foreboding, that inexorable, undeterred, arrival of imminent Loss. Our world seems to be a kind of game, but one designed by the gambling commission, wherein no player, if he or she plays long enough, can ever win. Can the Losses of our world be remedied? See my Personal Statement #63: Love In The AfterLife: Summerland: Where Dreams Come True, Part II: How You Will Yet Find Healing from the Devastating Losses of this World! Long, long shall I rue thee, too deeply to tell
Anne Spencer Morrow Lindbergh
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