Dr John F Demartini – a great man with whom I have spent much time – says, “The master is living in a world of transformation while the masses live in a world of gain and loss.”
I want to talk about this today because it is such an extraordinary statement.
It speaks to the endless suffering in the world which we, the masses, live in most of the time.
His comment that “There is a universal law which says that nothing can manifest without two sides” speaks directly to this issue. We don’t want life to be double sided, we want to separate out the good from the bad, the pleasure from the pain, the gain from the loss and we are obsessed with this, but it is utterly impossible.
An impossible obessession…not a good thing.
I remember talking to a client a while back, who was bemoaning the end of a relationship which she told me was so wonderful. I asked her what was so wonderful about it and she described a weekend on the Mediterranean with her boyfriend that was in her words, “absolutely perfect.”
There is no such thing as perfection. In every so called perfect moment, there is something negative.
Always.
Yes, always.
I don’t so this lightly. I have explored it in depth for a decade.
Because no thing, no event is all positive, this woman was living in a delusion.
If you are living in a delusion you are in terrible trouble.
On a broader scale just look at last week’s demise of Robert Mugabe. We know that there is no guarantee that his successor is going to be much different, yet people celebrate.
Not wise!
Back To The Woman
So I pushed this woman, really hard, to find the negatives in that weekend and after a significant amount of pressure from me she finally caved in and admitted that on this perfect romantic evening she remembered so well and longed to be repeated so much, she remembers thinking to herself, “This isn’t going to last!” There lies her suffering.
In addition, the rest of her relationship with this man was far from perfect.
All people and all relationships are deeply immersed in imperfection. If you don’t see this you are in major trouble.
And this is the problem with believing that we can have all positive experiences. It is lusting after experiences that are all gain and no loss and all it does is leave us elated and then deflated, manic and then depressed.
In the most simple cliché, ‘What goes up must come down.’
Up begets down. Siamese twins dancing into being and out of being, gain and loss, gain and loss…
We do this every day.
You ask your partner when they come home in the evening, “How was your day” and they’ll tell you that they had a good day if everything went well meaning there were many gains and few losses.
A bad day is one in which there are too many losses and few gains. And so we live not as the master in a process of transformation but as victims locked in a battle against loss and wanting more gains.
The balance sheet of life is just that, balanced. Demartini says that the balance is perfect, I disagree with him, but both sides is what we will always experience.
Moving Out Of Gain – Loss
The great question of course is how to move from this gain – loss, bi-polarity, to spending more time in transformation. Demartini’s primary technique is to look for the blessings in the pain and the drawbacks in the pleasure, to equilibrate ourselves and to come into balance, which is love and transformation.
Most people can do this if they are really pushed, but few people want to do it in an ongoing way.
More Money
Most people want more money.
Those who don’t have much of it, seldom if ever think of the drawbacks of having money. Just ask someone with a lot of money what the drawbacks are. They will tell you.
Here are just a few.
- Where to invest it, with all the anxieties that go along with this.
- Family members who are always wanting more of it!
- How much to give your kids without spoiling them. The biggest mistake parents who have money make, is that they want to save their kids from the pain of ‘not having money’. But it is that very pain that made the parents what they are. Destruction leading to Creation.
- Friends wants loans and they want you to pay for their expensive dinners.
- Discovering that when you spend all of this money it doesn’t give you the happiness you thought it would.
Decades ago I saw Michael Douglas interviewed by Larry King. King asked him about growing up and how this differed from his father’s experience. His answer was spellbinding, he said, “The only advantage that my father had over me was that he grew up without any money.”
Just ask anyone without money what they think of that and they’ll laugh at you. The problem is that not having money does have disadvantages and I do think more disadvantages than having money – you can tell Demartini I said that – but the crucial point is that having money isn’t problem free!
One of the ways that I use to get into balance and to spend more time in transformation, is to simply to see through the lie that we tell ourselves when we think something is all bad or all good.
We Lie To Ourselves
We hate it when other people lie to us but every single day of our lives we lie to ourselves about the way the world is and how it should be.
I know people who have complained about the same things – not seeing the blessings – about their lives well into their 80s.
It’s mind-boggling.
Clearly, this is not transformation. So what is it? If we don’t know what it is, then how on earth will we know if we are going there or getting there?
Transformation is radical change.
Let’s say your mother in law irritates you. You keep snapping at her.
Now you suppress the snap and smile, a bit ‘fakely’, but you smile nevertheless.
That’s change, but it’s not radical.
The next level up is you know that she is trying to control you, so you are trying to control her back and you then let go of the need to control her back.
That’s another level of change, perhaps not quite yet transformation.
The next thing you work on is to start feeling compassion toward her when she is trying to control you. You see the pain behind her need to control you and you care about her pain.
That is transformation!
You are not living in a knee jerk emotional response to what she does. This is Mastery.
Mostly we don’t live anything near that.
By the way, this compassion does not mean that you let her take advantage of you, manipulate or abuse you. A loving and compassionate boundary is a rare thing.
The Final Question
The question you might want to ask yourself is, do you want to be a master or one of the masses?
If you would like a face to face or Skype consultation, drop me a mail at realmark@icon.co.za
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