It is pain that grounds us. It is pain that acutely ties us to the Actual World. It is pain that draws us back to our roots of dirt and earth and reconnects us with Actuality. It is pain that strengthens and reaffirms our relationship with the Actual World in which we are immersed, which snaps us out of the metaphysical dream state we float into when Logos goes unchallenged.
Logos unchallenged spins off a series of logical but tenuously related ideas and images, creating concepts as it goes, tying them together, like "three headed horse" for example. Marriage, Government, Doctors, Policemen, Firemen, Nations, groups with names, functions with names. And why not? Or maybe "mickey mouse" or "talking dogs" like Pluto etc. etc. Without pain, there is no reason for wakefulness. Without pain there is no attention to Actuality. We suffer from the ravages of peace, a safe and secure world in which all the lions have been removed from the streets, where even silly females can march around arrogantly calling out to other silly females still peeking out of the frightened kitchen windows: "come on out girls, there is nothing to be afraid of." (There is no pain out here and no threat to the integrity of your integument). The silly delusional and illusory world called "civilization" where even the mentally ill can wander and still eat, sleep and survive. This safe civilization tolerates more and more poor judgment, endures more and more human beings incompetent at surviving a tough Actuality. The Truth is increasingly unnecessary and takes a second seat to Survival. For Survival is the goal in Actuality whereas survival in addition to "pleasure" or "happiness" or "flappiness, bappiness, wappiness, and other forms of silliness" are the goals of Reality. The pursuit of life, liberty and bappiness is the American theme and dream. And just as a sleeping man having an unusually pleasant dream is angry when awakened, so the person lost in the reverie of a pleasant Reality is angry when he is snapped back into Actuality, when his dream of nice ideas, of hopes, beliefs, plans, intentions, and conceptual thought, are disturbed and he is abruptly awakened.
In short, we suffer from the ravages of peace, as it is said. We suffer from such prolonged and habitual detachment from Actuality, from such a deep dreamlike state of illusion, a Reality from which it is increasingly difficult to return. Like Dorothy in the Land of Oz, we no longer know how to get back to, in touch with, Home. Which of course means we no longer remember the mechanism for returning to the state of Actuality, of Being, of Knowledge, of What-Man-Calls-God. We become too lost in the internecine world of conceptual Reality, the world of time and place, of cause and effect, of planning, scheming, of going somewhere at sometime via some mode of transportation. We become habituated to intellectual mentation and trapped in the world of Logos, behind its Veil of Maya, a finally lose all contact with the Actual World of Analogos, of childhood, of states of being.
How do we break this Veil of Maya, this invisible shield which prevents passage back to Actuality? How do we return from this Land of Oz? Should we click our heels.
How Reality is like a cocoon! How it envelopes the dreamer. And then when he is jostled from his larval-like state of sleep, he is shocked that he cannot break out so easily. What a terrible feeling. Like Edgar Allen Poe's fear of waking up in a casket, already buried but alive, smothered and trapped in deep darkness. What a terrible struggle. It is usually easier to remain "dead". It is said that the wages of Sin are death. Most cannot break out of this death-like state. Most die in their stiffening cocoons of belief, ideas and conceptual thought, leading lives of quiet desperation, silently pondering their escape, unable to figure it out, unable to move from their metaphysical situation, from their present state of being.
Many are called but few are chosen.......to understand.
A. Iosue