I created contrast. I created pain. I underwent pain on a level so deep that I couldn’t escape it. I created a personal imprisonment, something so dreadful that anything that I would live in contrast would be sheer pleasure and enjoyment. I decided to go through something so drastic that I could not help but enjoy life in comparison.
In contrast my life became a paradise of my own making. I didn’t change anything. I didn’t buy anything. I didn’t invest in some glamorous personal development or spiritual course. I didn’t frequent some guru who would make me happy.
Where I hated living, I now enjoy living, love every aspect of my life the contrast of becoming so satisfied with my life has made me enjoy every aspect so much more. By creating a pain period in my life, something I could not escape from, it forced me to see the finer things in life, to gain perspective and to grow from a life I hated to a life I love. I love every aspect of my life.
I felt being was uncomfortable. You know the story of the ungrateful family and the rabbi? Well, that is what I did to my soul. I once heard that Eckart Tolle say that I he had a pain threshold and that he reached a limit before letting go of suffering which wasn’t necessary. “All suffering is caused by ignorance.” – Dalai Lama
So, when I heard this in high-school, I decided to go through pain. I decided to suffer consciously until I could no longer take it. I figured that if I went through enough I’d be able to let go of my inner suffering. The point is, it worked.
We cause pain for ourselves, unnecessarily, and we inflict this on ourselves and then others if we’re unconscious of it. Going through pain makes us conscious. It makes us lucid of what we feel, to an extent that we reach that rock bottom where we believe that we never want to ever feel that thing every again. It’s not necessarily the nicest experience to go through I’ll grant you that.
But I will say that on a 1 minute experience, taking a cold shower is pretty much the same thing for the body and the mind. Imposing humiliating circumstances, going through pain, forcing ourselves to confront our fears, confronting those fears head on, making the decision to jump in head first and figure it out later. All of these things have contrasted my life a thousand fold and have made me feel like the richest man on earth, despite not making any money at all since 2017.
But I have a purpose, I feel grateful, I feel happy (I do) on a constant basis, I see the finite details I couldn’t see before. Maybe I can’t buy a Bugatti, or take a girl to dinner because I’m money broke and can’t seem to figure out how to monetize my life (despite having created a website around selling art, and writing a book, and other ventures…). The point is, I enjoy my life, I love my process, I love my mind and I enjoy my mundane.
And despite not having the haves, I know by contrast that everything I have been through has brought me to the understand that I will have. That any pain I will face, as if I have somehow grown accustomed to the difficulty, I will be able to overcome easily, or at the vest least I will be able to withstand it (blind optimism). It’s all about what we perceive.
The point is, thanks to my experiences, I don’t need much and I am in perpetual bliss with my present. I’ve become inner rich, despite being “poor”. While some of the richest people in the world at inner poor.
And who knows, maybe I’ve achieved what the feeling everyone is seeking. I’m enjoying every moment of my present. If I was doing things for money, that would be taking away from my present. And if we cannot accept the present, we cannot use the gift within: the possibility of now.
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