You need to be hurt to become awake.
You are born. The wailing echoes throughout the hospital ward. It was a successful birth with little-to-no complication. You feel the warm embrace of your mothers cautious hands as she gently holds you with all the care and love one could possibly feel, she had reached the one of the peaks of motherhood: the birth of a child, the birth of you.
You go through your infant, childhood and developing years, much without real thought or concern. You are pushed through life like a river through a riverbed. Effortless, weightless. There is a rough spectrum as to where your consciousness first arrives, from quite early, to quite late. During the years without consciousness, many ideas are reinforced and hammered within you through repeated exposure, from multiple sources: from parents, from authority figures, from teachers, from programs on the TV, from our fellow classmates, from societal pressures, from biological feedback etc etc.
When your consciousness is finally gained, you gain the self-awareness of your self-awareness, or in other words: meta-awareness. However, due to the nature of how the earth is today, with it’s endless distractions, many if not the vast majority of humanity, do not sit on their self awareness. That is to say, many, if not the vast majority of humanity, do not self reflect. In the manufactured, fast-paced world today, many find no time to truly spend time alone with themselves and to focus on their inner thoughts. “What am I doing here?” and “What are my goals?”. etc. There are also manufactured distractions, many manufactured distractions. Their goal is to make you spend the most amount of time on their manufactured distractions, they spend millions if not billions, a/b testing, in niche research into the workings of the Human Brain to see what makes it tick. (In this case, “tick” means what makes it focused on one thing and not another). What makes it “tick” is what makes it feel/pleasured, but we will get into this later.
“When Man does not know truly why he believes what he believes, why he does what he does, why he strives for what he strives, whilst knowing deep down within himself, that he needs the answers to these questions, and yet continues to ignore it, he will be left with eternal frustration up until he decides to pursue the deepest most intrinsic questions.” – StealthySūnnah
Ofcourse, you too, were helpless to the fancy distractions of this world. The younger you had no chance against it. Such is the same as a parent who does not expect their child to be mature at a young age. You coast through life, for the most part. Up until you hit a sudden wall, and then begins……THE FALL.
THE FALL
Suddenly, you descend from your high. The past was a fairy-tale-esque, cloud filled, mythic type blurry daydream, and all of a sudden you are hit with a gut wrenching fall that gives you rollercoaster-type metaphorical butterflies, and not the good kind. Akin to being awoken military-style from the most fanciful dream. The sudden reality hits you, and you get your first dose of something called Pain. It hurts. It’s uncomfortable. It makes you want to puke. You don’t feel comfortable in your own body. All you can do is try to remember the times when you weren’t feeling this. Whether it was a break-up that happened, a friend betraying you, you accidentally losing all your video-game save files, a dentist pulling your teeth out,your crush rejecting you or even you physically getting hurt, whatever was the case for you experiencing this pain, you are certain of one thing, it hurts and you never want to go through this again. At this exact, crucial point in time, you may not have done it, but you should have. You should have made a solid conviction to yourself that you will do whatever it takes to stay as far away as possible from this emotion, this feeling called Pain. Let me do some mental arithmetic for you:
Truth 1: Pain exists.
You can try your very best to stay away from Pain, and do a damn good job mind you, but that doesn’t change the fact that Pain exists out there in the world, inflicting others, and just waiting, waiting for you to slip up, make a crack in your armor, and strike you most vulnerable. I’ll teach you the best methods to protect yourself by the way, but that will come later in a series called [Personality Building]. First, before we make any precautions, we must figure out the truth, and the whole truth. The majority of people learn through painful experience, however most people decide to “bounce back” from this painful experience by jumping into distraction, the same distraction that had them unaware and fall naively into the pit of pain in the first place. We’re not going to do that, are we, truthseeker?
The Buddha’s first noble truth on his path to Enlightenment was that: [Life is Suffering]. In the Qur’an, Allah Almighty states:
It is important to note however that one can come upon this truth even without scripture. One experiencing and using reason and self-reflection can easily come upon this truth.
Truth 2: You do not self reflect as much as you need to.
You dislike pain. You wish to get away from it. But without self reflection, one can not escape it for long. You will encounter yourself in another tangle, in another knot where all around you, closing upon you, is the rope of pain ready to squeeze you once again and lower you back to square zero. You must self reflect. You must self reflect. Listen to the voice within you telling you to self-reflect. Do not delay it any longer, O truthseeker. Figure yourself out. Do what you know you must do. You must throw away all assumptions, all preconceived notions, and start from square zero, willingly. And build yourself back up, with iron foundations, willingly.
Truth 3: The Vast Majority of Humanity, including you, follow societal Pressure.
Once you come to experience Pain, by whatever means: One of the questions that will inevitably come to you will be “Why?”. If it was a person who inflicted pain, the question will be “Why did they inflict pain upon me?” or “Why did they do X and Y which led to pain for me?”.
The desperation for the answer to this question and many other questions is a good thing, although you may not see that right now, your self-reflective mode was kicked off to some degree by being doused in pain, you may not see it right now, but it is good in the long-term. You can go crazy searching for the individual answer of why they, specifically (the inflictor of pain) did so to you, and they can deprive you of an answer all they like, furthering your madness, or you can investigate why Humans do, broadly, and find answers.
Investigate, think deeply, try your best to figure out why Humans do things. Why does a girlfriend cheat or break their boyfriend’s heart. Why does a homeless man help out his fellow homeless person. What are these acts motivated by and why? Why do anything at all? Why not just lay there, rot and perish away into dust and blow into wind? Why do humans…do at all?
Investigate, and find out that Humans essentially have two main reasons/motivations to do any voluntary actions, and yes, it is that simple, literally two main reasons/motivations why Humans do anything voluntarily at all, why they get up, dust themselves off, and get something to eat rather then perish away, why they help their fellow homeless person, why they cheat and break other people’s hearts, why they do anything at all! And that reason is…: Pleasure and Pain.
You may know of Pain, but I have not yet mentioned anything about Pleasure thus far, so you may be confused. No worries, I will explain this in great detail in my upcoming video, and also on my website aswell as my Discord server, links in the description below.
We will skip the pleasure part for now, as it will be explained separately.
A question may be in your mind, one that goes “Oh yeah? If that’s true, why do people do things that they don’t want to do? Why do I wake up at 5AM to go to my work when I hate doing it?” or something to that tone.
Allow me to answer. You see, the human psychology, even though you may not be aware of it, weighs up all the pleasure and pain through all actions you do, even though you may not be aware of it doing so, and knows that the pain of going to work and doing the work + the pleasure of gaining money and being able to live semi-decently outweighs the sum of the pleasure of staying in bed + the pain of being homeless. You see, even if you do not consciously self-reflect on all this, your subconscious already weighs it all up. The problem with that is that the subconsciousness does not know what you truly value, so you pursue and go after the wrong things.
You will notice that many people go out in uncomfortable clothes, even if they really, deep down don’t want to. You will notice that many people do actions that bring them discomfort, even though really deep down, they don’t want to, just like you going to work everyday/ We can go on and on with the examples. The biggest factor in all of this is: “Societal Pressure”. They follow Psychological Hedonism, but they have not self-reflected, therefore it is not refined, If you’re wondering what Psychological Hedonism is, don’t, I’ll teach you what it means later, or you can search it up yourself if you really want to know early, but the danger with that is, the brain will make any excuse at slight discomfort to move away from learning, even if it may be true. So I recommend sticking with me and not learning what it means until I teach you, but ofcourse, you are free to do as you like. Naturalistically, being accepted by the tribe or society is a bigger pleasure then any of your personal pains, so you do what you don’t want to gain what you want, or rather what your subconscious and biological body thinks you want. But ask yourself, do I really want to appease the crowd, do I really want to be accepted by society, even over my own pleasures, personal goals and ambitions? Do I really want to walk across a million sharp spikes and nails for societal acceptance, is this..what I truly want?
When asked what their number one regret was, the vast majority of people on their deathbed, at the end of their life, answered that “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
If your personal goals and pleasures, perfectly align with being wanted to be accepted and part of the group then congratulations to you, you don’t really need to do much except be smarter about how to gain it. However, if you’re like me, and you have goals apart from being part of the pack, then, we have a journey you must undergo, as have I. A journey of rebuilding yourself, from square zero. You see, the biggest source of frustration nowadays is the disconnect, the cognitive dissonance between what people’s subconscious, their biological body tells them they want, versus what they consciously want, the long-term goals the subconscious cannot fathom, the goals you should truly strive for, the goals that the subconscious could never comprehend, the goals whose pleasures would last a lifetime.
At this point in time, you should feel an unease, a disconnect between the subconscious’ desires and your (the consciousness’) desires. The cogs should be moving in your brain, yes Indeed. You should not be following what others expect of you, do not feel as though you need to impress others, as though you need to look good in their eyes, in exchange for your own comfort and pleasure. I implore you and beg of you, do not do what most people regret when they look back at their life on their deathbed.
Remember: Life can only be lived forwards, but lessons can only be extrapolated when looking backwards.
So look at what people dying on their deathbed said is their number one regret, and don’t do that.
This thread is part of a series of threads I’m intending to release on this website that teach people, from square zero, the whole truth. I hope this thread has in some way been helpful to you. If you have any questions, feel free to join my Discord server and directly ask me and others any questions or just chat with us. I’ll have a visual an audio version of this thread on my Youtube channel, so check it out if you desire to.
Thank you all so much for watching, and I’ll see you in the next video.
Peace be unto you.