The world rewards unconsciousness and punishes consciousness. The world rewards stress, it rewards boredom, it rewards lack of originality, it rewards selfishness, it rewards fear and it rewards obedience, addiction and fakery.
This world wants you to be unconscious because it wants you to be a machine.
This means that the more unconscious you are, the more you think and act like a machine, the more successful you will be. Rich, successful and ambitious people will tell you something different, but they would, wouldn’t they? They think and act like machines, so of course they’ll tell you that you need to be creative, hard-working and wise, but none of these things actually get you very far in the world.
The world will also tell you that machines are conscious. You can’t turn people into machines if people think they are going to lose something, so they have to believe that there is no real difference between people and machines. How can you lose a flaming monkey spirit you don’t have?
This is why the world doesn’t want you to feel any pain, because pain wakes you up. It makes you consciously realise that you are not a machine, you are a man or a woman.
The world shields you from pain because pain is instructive. Pain tells you to change direction, to remove your hand from the hot plate or to stop doing stupid things.
But the world doesn’t want you to change direction. It doesn’t want you to remove your hand from the hot plate. And it certainly doesn’t want you to stop doing stupid things! So it will make sure you don’t feel the fire of pain, or if you do, that you don’t listen to what the flames are saying.
Pain will tell you when you are talking with someone who is trying to trick you. Pain will tell you when you are being selfish and ruining the mood of the room. Pain will tell you when you are being a coward and running from your duties or from new experiences. Pain, if you listen to it, will relieve you of the misery of trying to work out what on earth you should do.
The FIRE of pain is a challenge to the spirit to leap out of yourself into something bigger, into the moment, even if that moment seems to your self to be a boring little room. And you’ll see, when you’ve left your self behind, that it wasn’t the room that was boring, it was your meek submission to your self’s idea of it.
You have been reading a tiny extract from The Fire Sermon, my cartoon-illustrated pocketbook guide to life, love, death, self and world. You can get a copy from my bookshop, or from the usual on-line retailers.
