Love and Pain - A Map of Consciousness - The Collected Works of Thaddeus Golas Vol. 3
by Thaddeus Golas, author of The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment
ISBN: 978-0-9830574-2-0
Size: 5″X 7.6″ Inches – 176 pages.
Availability: Book in print/available
Author Thaddeus Golas, known for his classic manual on human consciousness, The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment (Seed Center, 1972) returns to publication 40 years after he delivered the simplest, most powerful, and effective, spiritual handbook ever written.
"I thought Love and Pain might short-stop the blind
submission to charismatic leaders by people who took good feelings as
evidence of spirituality.”
From the Foreword:
"Why is our spiritual understanding of
so little help to us as human beings?
Why do we vainly pursue magical
powers?
Where do evil and pain come from?
Are we doing something wrong?
Is there a way to do it right?
Is there something we need to learn
to get away from here?
We have tried many answers to such
questions, all rooted in the puzzle of
what the spirit is and what it does.
Some of the answers seem to work for a time.
Some provide pleasant feelings.
Some require impossible or impractical demands on human behavior. Many are pure folly, and some just whistling
in the dark."
From Chapter One:
"When an
entity's actions agree with neighbors, the sensation is one of unimpeded
momentum, of pleasure. When there is a
difference in actions, the sensation is one of stopped or slowed motion, of
pain. The absolutes of space or mass, continuous consciousness or
unconsciousness, are always richly pleasurable in feeling.
Energy relations, however, can easily be
painful, because rapid vibrating introduces another sort of behavioral
difference: being out of synchronization. One vibrating entity may be expanded whenever its neighbor is
contracted, and vice versa, repeatedly. Each is always aware of an unconscious neighbor who is painful to be
near, and who does not move away. Let us
dwell on this situation, because it is the key to all the undesired feelings in
the universe, including those in our human lives.
Energy is the devil, the tease, the thrill,
the delinquent, the messenger who delivers only half the message, the marker of
time.
Energy promises dominion over the world. It accumulates endless details of
information. It creates forms and
systems and destroys them. It has
beginnings and endings, monotonously repeating changes, and therefore time
belongs to energy relations. It is the
outside agitator. It has unforeseen
side-effects.
It is
explosive and excessive, and there is never enough of it."
Author Thaddeus Golas on Love and Pain:
"Love & Pain is
practical – I wanted information for myself I could rely on.
I am not a
carefree reader; I am a corrosive critic of current stuff.
I did a lot
of theorizing before writing The Guide, actually
writing it in a spaced-out condition.
Then I realized it wasn’t enough, I had
to figure out the local reality we are in, 'that which happens regardless of
what anyone thinks about it.”
When my first book was published, I considered it was sufficient to read the first line of Chapter One: "We are equal beings and the universe is our relations with each other.”
Once that idea was installed in the mental computer, I thought, any
mind could sort itself out. Perhaps others can give it better extension
than I have. I wrote The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment in language that any reader of English could understand, making it as easy as possible. Now, in writing Love and Pain,
I decided to state the case as clearly as I could without regard to a
general audience, as though I was writing to a friend, someone like
myself.
Over the decades, along with the problem of working out the book’s
concepts, I stewed over the difficulty of communicating them. There was
a wide range of possible applications, and many levels of vocabulary at
which the language could be pitched. At first I thought it would be
best to write an imaginative work that might catch the attention of
people better versed in sciences.
Power begins with the willingness to endure pain without changing. Everyone wants power. Even the New Age people want the world to bend to their thoughts.
I know there are enormous industries built on the flight from pain.
The cost of medical care multiplies much faster than the rate of
inflation, and the children of the middle class inherit little wealth.
A better understanding of the role of pain in our lives might diminish
such nonsense, but the net quotient of suffering will probably remain
the same. I am not offering that sort of deliverance. What I do offer in Love and Pain is a clear understanding of the real benefits that any person may
expect from prolonging consciousness. Consciousness does not give the
power to control energy and matter. It is the power to push them away,
to leave this reality and stay away. That is all consciousness does,
but it is enough. The rewards are truly much more profound than
anything we can enjoy on Earth.
There are great advantages in the information in this book: knowing
how our reality works, we can avoid wasting emotions, time and effort in
pursuit of false goals. Personally, I found great relief in realizing
that I was not obliged to correct anyone’s erroneous opinions, since
ideas do not do anything. Also, I could stop criticizing myself for
failing to dwell in constant bliss. When I encounter pain, it does not
mean that I have necessarily been stupid: pain is inevitable in human
life, whichever path we take. Neither am I obliged to rescue others
from their pain: they will gain greater strength in enduring it and
solving their own difficulties. I try to be kind to strong people
because they have endured much to become strong. That which offends the
sentimental in the short run is often the greatest kindness over a
longer time.
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