Cloudscape

If you have become too so absorbed in your thoughts that you can no longer feel, the only way you can feel again is by letting go off control. Ironically, you have to let go off control to regain control over your thoughts.

With letting go off control, I do not mean that you become passive to everything that happens, but that you accept it. You might still change those things, but it will no longer be because you think you have to. Change things because you feel you want to, not merely because you think you must. Thought is a medium through which change is organized, but the motivation for change originates from our feelings.

The irony is that through acceptance, you may become much better in changing things than through rejecting them, since it allows you to build from the things that are already there, rather than seeking to undo them before starting over. Everything can be used to build something else, even if it is its opposite.

In order to be in control, you must control your need for control. Do not be attached to control, for this is in itself loss of control.

You will learn the most not through suffering, but through the enjoyment of as many experiences as possible, but only if that enjoyment is in the form of love rather than a need for distraction from suffering. Suffering merely occurs when we resist experiences when we are still to learn to love them. Being confronted with those experiences can help us to learn to love them, and it is so that to some, suffering sometimes seems the best way to learn. But this suffering is merely the resistance to the learning process.

Bliss in beauty is the triumph of love; suffering in beauty is its failure, but so too its triumph in bringing itself so far as to try.

It is true that we must confront this resistance in order to overcome it, but suffering in itself is just that which keeps us from beauty. Only once we have learned to love an experience have we truly found its beauty. Pain too must be loved, but just therefore it should not be suffered.

If you try to learn as much as possible, it may be that you will suffer the most, but nonetheless, do not seek suffering in itself, for when you suffer, your love becomes exhausted, and so too the will to love. But if you seek love rather than suffering, then your love may grow through its love for itself, until finally it spreads to things that you would otherwise have suffered and not loved.

A careful balance is needed between seeking more of what which you already love and seeking other things that you have not yet learned to love. Stay too much with the things you already love, and your love will turn to boredom. Explore too much, and your love will become harmed. Either way leads to apathy.

Too much adventure into the unknown, and we hurt ourselves through the suffering of too much pain; too little, and we hurt ourselves through the suffering of too much emptiness.

The greater your consciousness, which leads to sensitivity, the more you will have of either, unless it is paired with an equally great self-consciousness, which leads you to balance. People often suffer the most when their consciousness is greater than their self-consciousness. Consciousness helps us to be receptive, self-consciousness helps us to be in control.

Either how, things will always change, even if it is but through the duration that things remain the same. But even so, things always remain the same, even if it is but change that remains the same. You cannot be free from suffering nor find love unless you find balance between change and sameness.

Change too little, and the things you have will change by becoming monotonous, so that they become harder to enjoy; unless you either learn to enjoy the monotony, which is in itself also a change, or unless you change, so that your enjoyment may remain the same. Change too much, and the change will also become monotonous, so that it becomes harder to enjoy change, unless you learn to live with the monotony or stop changing, so that your enjoyment of change may remain the same.

Love may be lost either if it is not renewed through enjoyment or if it is harmed through suffering, and both will happen if there is too much sameness or too much change. In sameness, love the things you already love; in change, love things you have not loved before.

We must transcend our abilities to love but also preserve the ability to love we already have, so that its growth is not stalled, and this can be done if transcendence and preservation there are both enough, if there is balance between emptiness and fullness, light and dark.

See also:

Love and Suffering

Always remember when trying to change your feelings that you change them only in whatever way already feels is truly the best for you in this moment, and not based on your thoughts of how you "ought" to feel.