On the Wounds of Love: Part Three – Marc Gafni
marc gafni
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On the Wounds of Love: Part Three
continued from Blog Post Nine
Yes, all beings are hurt. We all carry some untransformed wound. But in the end we all must choose whether our wounds are to be allowed to fester in us, converted to malevolence, or transmuted into compassion. Suffering can lead us deeper into love or deeper into separation and hatred. It is always a choice. We each choose the prism for our pain, and the lens we choose is ultimately the mark of our level of consciousness. For a young child or a person at a certain level of consciousness, rage and pain can seem like reason to kill. The great revelation of the Axial Age lawgivers is that wounded honor is not to be personally avenged in spilled blood–and as the Talmud reminds us, there are many ways to spill a person’s blood. Some of them are so subtle that the person doesn’t know he’s been stabbed. Others may drain the blood from a person’s face in such a way that it takes years to set things right.
To avoid translating pain into violence–whether physical, verbal, or imaginary–we need to pay close and unflinching attention to our interiority.
We are required to clarify our pain through what a kabbalist might call the questions of Berur, the Clarification of Desire.
I have organized the questions on the page in a bit of confused way. Disorganized and disjointed, because that is how the questions come up in our minds. Let your mind roam from question to question until the questions enter the very core of your being. Try and let your mind become very still and let the depth and truth of these questions expand your heart and evolve your consciousness.
1) What thoughts arise regarding your pain?
2) Is the pain created by what happened or by your thoughts about what happened?
3) Who would you be if we without these thoughts about your pain?
4) What beliefs do we hold about what happened, at this very moment?
5)Are they true?
6) Are we sure that they are true?
7) If we were alone in a room with God and she said: Your eternity and the lives of our children rest on your telling the absolute truth at this moment–would you still hold your beliefs about “what happened” as true?
8) How does that belief serve your agenda in this moment?
9) What deeper truth does it cover up?
10) What or who would you be–or how would you feel–if you told yourself a different story about your pain?
11) How much of your identity is bound us with your pain?
12) Are you blaming someone for your pain?
13) What if you turned it all around and made yourself a responsible party instead of the victim in the story?
14) How does taking some responsibility help us loosen the weight of our anger and take some of the projection back?
15) How does it help us move from a blame frame to recognizing that everyone has a share in contributing to realities that created the pain?
16) What gain to we receive from our pain–what profit is there for us, what social capital do we earn in telling and re-telling the story of our pain?
We long for certainty. But are we ever really certain of the correctness of our ideas about how the world should be? In moments of hurt and blame, if we can step out of our frame and go deeper, we might identify that behind our need to blame someone–even ourselves–for our pain is a feeling of being alone, of being cut off and isolated from the rest of reality. As we look into that deeper place then we might–often for the first time–be able to watch how the mechanism of ego works.
Marc Gafni
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