DEEPAK CHOPRA
You don't have to give up your pain, you should just give up your suffering. Pain is a very normal component of life. Without pain we wouldn't have the experience of pleasure. So you shouldn't even attempt to give up your pain. Life is a flow between the riverbanks of pain and pleasure. That's what makes experience one of contrast. But when you get attached to your pain, that of course is a different thing all together. That's called suffering.
THOMAS MOORE
So if the symptom, the problem, the complaint is that I'm inferior, that I feel inferior, we stay with that then maybe we have to explore the possibility that we have to find a kind of inferiority that doesn't hurt us, and doesn't undo us. We have to find a more soulful, you might say, inferiority. Now that may seem very odd, especially in a world that hates inferiority. But let me tell you what I mean.
Inferiority, if we follow that through, could be a way of discovering our lower, you might say, our lower humanity, which we all strive to be high all the time. We want to be educated so highly, we want to know so much. And yet the myths, the great mythologies of the world warn us against being too ambitious about knowledge, that we're going to be destroyed if we strive too high and too far that way.
The mythologies and religions really tell us that it's important to be inferior, to discover our foolishness, our ignorance. The mystics talk about this all the time. So there is a kind of inferiority that is not a literal destruction of oneself.
Rather there is a lowering of expectation, lowering of ambition, so that we live and discover the value of things, like not knowing everything, of failing in so many things, of getting sick now and then, of being emotionally unstable now and then, all of these things.
The various things that weaken us, and bring along with them feelings of inferiority can be very fruitful to the soul. More fruitful than the superior moments when we think we know what we're doing and we're on the right track, and we haven't failed, we've succeeded. Those could be even more dangerous to soul.
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