"Out beyond rightdoing and wrongdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there."
Jelaluddin Rumi (1207-1273).
We live in a world of duality, hard-soft, hot-cold, masculine-feminine, right-wrong, positive negative. The material world requires this to function, we need friction to move about. When I watch a movie on the silver screen I can readily determine who is the good guy and who is the bad guy, what is good and what is evil. Sometimes it takes a while to see that killing Mr.Smith saved a whole country, but when it is realized it re-frames my perspective.
When the movie is over I realize it was all a play, that I am really fine, an asteroid or (insert calamity here) is not going to kill me. That does not keep me from becoming emotionally invested in the movie or learning something from it or, simply being entertained by it.
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
William Shakespeare
The quote by Rumi refers to the place beyond the play, where we will see that ,sure, there was good and bad, right and wrong, but from the souls eye view it was nothing. You can go to this place in meditation and bring a little of it back with you each time. The thing to keep in mind is that suffering is temporal and thus temporary and things that are very disturbing to us now may seem to be only a bump in the road from an eternal perspective. Does this ease suffering? It does for me.
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