16 How pleasure gets twisted into self-perpetuating cycles of pain

Self-perpetuating cycles of pain are what result from the conflict created when two creative forces go in opposing directions inside us…Naturally, everyone’s favorite direction is toward the light…But in reality, this is a world in which there are forces that oppose the light…

Take, for instance, the physical level. The entire physical being is striving for health and wholeness. When there’s a disturbance that pulls the other way, we feel pain…If we were aware that in addition to our desire for health, we have a hidden desire for non-health, the struggle would go away. For we’d be hard pressed to hang onto a desire to be unhealthy if we were consciously aware of it…

So what’s really clogging up the works is the stuff in our unconscious; this is what creates the seeming gap between cause and effect…The cause, then, is the hidden negative wish; the effect is that there’s a disturbance in our system. The end result? Self-perpetuating cycles of pain…

There is another plane of existence, the spiritual plane…Since the spiritual plane is where the positive direction originates, this plane doesn’t contain a negative direction. It simply cannot. This is the plane of unity…When we are free from conflict and pain, we are in unity…

The kicker here is to remember that under every distortion, what’s real—what’s infinitely positive—still exists…So then any time we have something negative in our make-up, it’s never all of us…The part that sides with life is going in the direction of love. The anti-life side, on the other hand, is hell-bent on hating and isolating and staying in fear…

We step across a major threshold on our spiritual journey when we make the discovery that some part of us wishes for a negative outcome…When we don’t know we have a deliberate dark streak, we suffer far greater. We feel singled out as a victim and don’t get that we have a stake in the pain we’ve created…We must see that negativity is only a temporary reality. It will eventually grind to a halt as it takes us to our knees…

Whenever we are separated from others, we’re swimming in the sphere of negativity. So then regardless how much we want union and wholeness, there is another side doing the sidestroke of resistance. The more we deny this, the more it hurts. Don’t forget, it’s not possible to want 100% isolation and separation…

The part of this drama that makes it so compelling is that we get a precarious pleasure from indulging in our destructive ways…We don’t want to give up our pleasure…We now hold the tools in our hands to make different choices. Perhaps we can now see a way forward to living a life that is free from pain.

Listen and learn more.

Bones, Chapter 16: How Pleasure Gets Twisted into Self-Perpetuating Cycles of Pain

Read Original Pathwork® Lecture: #140 Conflict of Positive versus Negative Oriented Pleasure as the Origin of Pain