You cannot be a thinking human, in this world, and not feel pain. Even unthinking humans suffer! Humans suffer from the very fact of our existence. It is what you get when you are born. How you manage the pain is what defines the quality of your life.
The wounded healer archetype (Chiron) really resonates with me and applies 100% to the life I've lived so far.
if anyone would like me to quote a few dead writers and philosophers just lemme know! :D But when i read about this topic what comes up again and again is what MDAO alluded to in the last thread. which is to avoid navel-gazing, and perhaps embrace altruism in some form. i suppose ideally you would attain wu-wei! or a higher 'flow-state' where you're living for something greater than yourself. since wu wei is not something that can be cultivated intellectually you run into this 'paradox of spontaneity' issue. i understand foreigner has probably tried all this. end ramble
I never tried wu wei, it just sort of happened like you said. I struggled for a long time with reconciling emptiness with the need to apply forms and definitions to my life, because nothing seemed to fit. It felt like any choice I made was phony, and creating more "karma" for no reason. It has been difficult to see through the underlying meaninglessness of everything. What changed is that I realized wu wei never goes away, no matter what I do or don't do. It's not "there" when you meditate and then "gone" when you go back to the world. There is no leaving or returning. So when you suffer, when you are joyful, when you are lazy or productive, it's all right there.
So really, just do whatever you want. It's not you who's doing it, it's the Dao.
So there's that aspect... and then there's the fact that I spent years denying my human level experience by trying to live in the Absolute. It's true that this is all just the Dao, but there is a tiny child voice in you that is denied every time you claim that nothing else is behind it. That child wants acknowledgment, it wants to hear, "But I am doing this!" And that child is everything. It is the origin of all your likes and dislikes, and joys and hurts. It is your true inner virtue.
It's all just Oneness at the end of the day, so why bother doing anything? Doesn't really matter if I live or die, have a fulfilled life or an unfulfilled one. But it starts to cause health problems eventually, when you abdicate your human level experience in this way... always deferring to Oneness. It shows up in your body or in your mind. The meat always drags you back down to Earth, eventually. There is a part of you that just wants to be you, and nothing else, and it doesn't care about what is real or unreal, it is real to itself. And that is the part that existential depression is based on... because we feel like that inner child is invalidated by this awesomely huge awareness of a formless Absolute. But the truth is that you're both. There are Jains in India who literally starve themselves to death in the forest in total abdication of this human level self. I think it's the wrong way to go about it. The Advaita followers are all like robots, all repeating the same "Oneness" themes, and it rings hollow to me. It feels good to be a me, to have preferences, to have true virtues that resonate with me (like being an herbalist and helping others to get well, even if their bodies all die eventually anyway). And yes there is a huge difference between starting out as a "me", and then returning to a life true to that "me" after discovering wu wei.
This is a strange analogy but... it's kind of like people who say that there's no point in worshiping a specific deity, like Shiva, or Freida, or White Tara, because they're all just part of the Divine anyway. But the point is, specificity. Yes, at the end of the day none of this matters, there is no inherent meaning or structure... but if you sit for too long with that Absolute, you deny giving it any form that fills you with life. So maybe I want to invoke Shiva into my life, to transform it?... knowing full well that Shiva is just another part of the Maya. But so am I, unique in all the world, so why not give an offering to that as well?
Your own personality level ego is much the same. I've known people who do psychedelics non-stop all year long because they think they've found the truth of the Absolute, and they probably have, but they aren't embracing their own aspect of that Absolute. The Absolute resides in you, as you.
Choosing
a form that resonates with that inner child and feels good reunites you with your own humanity. I think that may be a solution. Going into my childhood memories of all those times I spent alone and just enjoying my own devices... there is a goldmine there about how to live as a veritable me that is not lost in this sea of Absolute, but is completely 100% in cooperation with it.
Sorry, that was a really long explanation.
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
