The Pain of Others - (573)

Introduction

This is a topic all on its own. I topic I think is worth investigating.

We normally are quite aware of our own pain and normally regard it as quite important. However, things are different when it comes to the pain of others.

We normally are not very aware of the pain of others and we have the tendency to shrug off the apin that others feel.

In fact we can often disregard the pain of others and we can quite easily fall into a sort of pride where we believe “others shouldn’t suffer or their suffering is silly and over nothing” and only our suffering is valid, worthy and makes us more distinguished, experienced, learned and hard done by in life, where we should receive more respect and consideration from others.

Relativity

From what has just been written it sounds a lot like we when it comes to pain, we see pain in relativity. That is our pain is important and yours or their pain is not important. In some way this attitude of relativity is behind many acts of cruelty, violence, discrimination and even war.

We see the pain of others as silly, invalid and unimportant because we see our pain as the opposite, that is important, valid, worthy, worthwhile and untouchable.

Actually thinking and feeling like this keeps us stuck in pain and and seeing it in an exaggerated way.

Balanced

We would come to a different perception of pain and freer attitude to pain if we were to balance our perception. That is if we were to use the other side of relativity, seeing our pain as not as important as others, especially where others go though and have gone through much worse.

When we see our pain in a balanced way the exaggeration stops and we stop focussing so much attention on it and our identification or entrapment in it is lightened somewhat.

Conclusion

I think in conclusion we should treat the pain of others as we would treat our own pain. Just as Jesus the Christ said: “treat others as you would have them treat you”.

If we can be sensitive to the pain of others and to see their pain as it is, not undervaluing or overvaluing it, we can help them and at the same time free ourselves from our own the relativity.

The relativity to do with pain is very grave actually and is behind so much of our errors when it comes to others. Pride and arrogance is behind such errors, pride and arrogance are blindness of relativity.

End (573).