I have suffered very much more than most in my life. To quantify it, theres an ACE score that measures the most serious adverse childhood events on a scale of zero to ten. Most people have an ACE score of 0 or 1, and the "worst category" is people with 4 and up. I had 7, and the things polled weren't even the half of just how bad it was. I was a chemistry kid so at age 13 I synthed a lethal portion of potassium cyanide and kept it in a sealed lab tube by my bed. There were mornings where I'd sit with the thing in my hand, 13 years old, wondering whether to ingest the poison and go back to sleep, or take just one more day of this atrocity. I chose life, until the day came I disposed of the poison.
I suffered a LOT. Not going into it too much but more than most.
I was traumatized into a parody of a human being, incredibly function impaired.
What I did: I took entheogens, I got a bad trip where I relived all the horrors and reintegrated them, then let it settle in my life, dose again, horrif bad trip again, relive and reintegrate, and so on and on for.. Guys.. 25 years.
Over those 25 years the "bad"of the bad trips became decreasingly bad. With it, my functioning in life kept improving dramatically. As a metaphor, I was basically giving myself a pain tolerance by eating hot pepper over and over, but then the pain was psychologic and the peppers were entheogens.
The standard Grofian sequence occurred (see Stanislav Grof, LSD Psychotherapy) where i started processing traumas that were at a younger and younger age, until I reached the perinatal stage and processed the birth trauma, then a series of devastating Ego Death experiences happened that each were a system reboot without the traumatic material, and after that, finally, I moved into the transpersonal realm as one of the very few who got there.
Pain is horrible, especially psychological anguish, but I am living proof that it can be overcome and that entheogens can help you do that.
I'm a bonsai. A big tree pruned/tortured into a miniature shape by the hardships of life, but in being that I have ten times the spirit the big tree would have ever had.
Pain and suffering is instrumental in character building. You need it. People who went through a lot are usually more profound and empathic than those for whom life was a foam ball box of awesome.
Its easier to impress someone negatively than positively, and this is why we must develop our technologies until we either can rewire our organism or, better till, carry over into completely redesigned and better-than-the-real-thing synthetic bodies.
The human body/mind as it is now is more torture chamber than wellness spa - this is result of evolution and we must strive to transcend it.
