(From Handbook For Humans)
Perhaps the most salient feature of the physical world is the existence of pain and suffering. Not that it can’t exist at other levels, but at the physical level pain can’t be ignored; it strongly grabs our attention. When armies collide, people die. When physical pain is there it can be agonizing. Even our emotions seem to be grounded in the body.
So Body is the dimension where pain and death stare us in the face. It’s the dimension of joy too, of course, but we don’t worry about that. When our environment presents us with positive energy, we tend to just enjoy it. We don’t ask why it’s there; we don’t analyze it. We just respond happily.
It’s when the environment presents us with negative energy—pain, suffering, loss, defeat, anger, fear, illness, and so on—the whole litany of negativity—that our challenges begin. Now we must come up with some more resourceful way of dealing with this energy, because it hurts.
To me, pain and suffering may be the biggest mystery of all. I can remember as a child thinking, “If God is totally loving and all powerful, then why do pain and suffering exist?” Somehow, if God could allow pain and suffering to exist, the universe felt a little unsafe. Maybe more than a little.
So pain and negativity are, in a sense, the cutting edge. How to deal with them?
It might be fruitful to ask in the first place what we mean by “negativity.” What does it mean when we say that something is bad or wrong, or that it’s negative?
Basically, we seem to experience something as negative when it imperils the existence or aliveness of ourselves or something that we’re strongly identified with. So anything that imperils our personal image, our body, our family, our country, our team, our tribe, our group, our ideas, territory and so on, can be seen as negative.
Something negative has another quality too: It’s already stuck around long enough to have caught our attention more than once; it’s a problem. When we can easily or quickly handle something, we don’t think of it as negative or a problem; it’s just a part of life. So negativity is a problem that’s persisting; it’s causing us some perplexity.
For instance, if we keep driving our car it will sooner or later run out of gas and be unable to run; that’s a problem. But the problem is normally solved so easily and routinely—by pulling into the nearest gas station—that we don’t ordinarily think of it as a problem, something negative. So “negativity” means that our initial or routine approach to a problem has not made it go away. What now?
In my opinion, the essence of dealing with something negative, that is, something imperiling what we’re identified with, and which can’t be routinely handled, is to transcend the system in which the problem has occurred.
Einstein said that the problems that really plague us can’t be solved at the level at which they’re posed. In other words, if something is a problem in our normal paradigm, that paradigm is probably not the most enlightening lens through which to look at the problem.
Thus any problem that’s persistent in troubling us will probably not be readily or easily solved at the level at which it came into being. To “jump out of the system,” in Ron Kurtz’ memorable phrase, means to come out of our ordinary system for looking at or dealing with this kind of problem.
An example is Rini, discussed in chapter 7. Basically, she solved her problem by jumping out of the paradigm she was in. By considering the problem through a new system, as one involving the balance and vitality of her whole body rather than the illness of specific organs within it, she was able to give herself a much better chance to successfully meet the challenge.
In doing so, she had to grow. She had to perceive things in a different way. That is usually the primary characteristic of a successful response to any kind of persistent negativity.
A very radical transcendence of any system we’re in is to increase the wholeness of the system itself by reframing or incorporating those parts of it that are rejected, condemned, or considered worthless. In practical terms, that comes down to the question, “Can we love this too?” Can we really have compassion for this part of existence too?
© 1997 by James Sloman
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