Hi Scout,
This wanting to help the suffering stop is a remarkably potent force that you can definitely use effectively.
But that’s the question, how to use it effectively?
If you just look at the world and see all the sorrow and compassion that is already on display – you will see that this doesn’t work. It doesn’t work to actually stop the madness and suffering you are witnessing.
Feeling sad and sorrowful leaves you in a position to not be able to do anything due to lack of outwardly-directed energy. Sorrow can naturally turn to outrage, which is a form of aggression – and then look, you yourself are contributing to the madness, using the very same passionate energy, aggression, that mother is using to threaten her helpless daughter. You may feel that aggression applied appropriately, towards the proper targets, will solve the situation – you just have to look at humanity’s long and bloody history to already know that this won’t work.
What you can do, however, is actually eliminate the root cause of all this suffering and sorrow and malice and aggression… which is nothing other than you, the feeling-being that you are. A PCE makes this abundantly clear, that this is all you have to do – sacrifice yourself in your entirety for the benefit of this body, that body, and every body.
And the immediate next question once this goal is established is, what do you do in the meantime? And in the meantime the best thing to do is to imitate that actuality as best as you can – which is done via enjoying and appreciating this moment of being alive, a way of life that has come to be known as the actualism method.
In this way all your passionate energy is directed towards one goal only, which immediately has actual tangible benefits for the people around you (just ask any actualist how their success has affected those closest to them), and as a side-benefit you get to enjoy being alive too. This is in stark contrast with fueling and channeling sorrow and outrage, which has the effect of making those around you also sorrowful and outraged, which then only propagates further and causes those very problems you seek to end.
This is not a cop-out, a trick, a scheme, or a cunning strategem to avoid actually helping others in order to selfishly only help yourself. It’s actually the exact opposite - it is sacrificing what you hold most dear (which is you, yourself, your outrage, your sorrow, your anger) for the benefit of others and the actual flesh and blood body you are parasitically inhabiting.
But how can you be happy and harmless when mothers are out there beating their children, and far worse? This is where you ask yourself if you can emotionally accept that which is intellectually unacceptable.
The former is not to be separated out from the latter. It isn’t acceptance. It is continuing to recognize that all of this madness is completely unacceptable – you don’t cripple your intelligence by putting on blinders and pretending this is the case – and yet allowing yourself to emotionally accept that this is indeed the world we live in, this is how it works, this is what people do. It is what happens… and the world keeps rotating and orbiting the Sun. And the best thing, the very best thing you can do, to actually improve the situation and not just feel like you are improving it (which is what the sorrow and outrage actually do – they are the self-centered variant of the two as it is only done to assuage your feelings!) – is to give yourself up, increasingly allow the benevolence and benignity of the actual world to operate, until the day finally dawns when you allow yourself to self-immolate.
RICHARD: One can become virtually free from all the insidious feelings – the emotions and passions and calentures – which fuel the mind and give credence to all the illusions and delusions and fantasies and hallucinations which masquerade as visions of The Truth. One can become virtually free of all that which has encumbered humans with misery and despair and live in a state of virtual freedom … which is beyond ‘normal’ human expectations anyway. In virtual freedom one is ninety nine percent free and the other one percent causes very little trouble – if any – and with virtual freedom operating in every human being there could be a virtual global peace-on-earth. Howsoever that may be, the day of destiny ultimately dawns wherein one is catapulted into actual freedom. One will have obtained release from one’s fate and achieved one’s birthright … and the world will be all the better for it. [L]
Cheers,
Claudiu