Quality
Intelligence is like the sharpening of a sword. The sharpness of a sword is due to friction. If there was no friction against the sword it could not have a sharp edge.
So one may have intelligence within, but it only grows and manifests after there is struggle without. That is why intelligent people are born in times of struggle; when the struggle is over they disappear. The more challenge you have in life the more sharpness you will have, and if there is no challenge at all, sharpness is lost.
When there is pain, go deeply into it, don’t avoid it. Let it be so, be open to it and become as sensitive as possible. Let the pain and its arrow penetrate you to your very core. Suffer it. And when the pleasure comes, let that too move you to your innermost core. Dance it. When there is pain be with pain, and when there is pleasure be with pleasure. Become so totally sensitive that each moment of pain and pleasure is a great adventure. If you can do this you will understand that pain too is beautiful. It is as beautiful as pleasure. It brings sharpness to your being and it also brings awareness to your being – sometimes even more than pleasure.
Pleasure dulls. That’s why people who live just in indulgence will be found to be shallow, you will not see any depth in them.
Pain makes you very alert, pain makes you very compassionate and pain makes you sensitive to others’ pains too. Pain makes you immense, huge, big. The heart grows because of pain. It is beautiful, it has its own beauty.
The taste has to be learned – it is just like other tastes. When you start anything new you have to learn the taste. And of course the taste of pain is bitter. But once you have learned it, it gives such sharpness and brilliance to you. It shakes all dust, all stupor and sleepiness away from you. It makes you more fully mindful that anything else. In pain you can be more meditative than in pleasure.
Pleasure is more distracting. Pleasure engulfs you. In pleasure you abandon consciousness. Pleasure tends to make you unconscious; pleasure is a sort of oblivion, a forgetfulness. Pain is a remembrance: you cannot forget pain.
Pain can become a very creative energy and it can become awareness.
When pain is there use it as awareness, as meditation, as a sharpening of the soul. And when pleasure is there then use it as a drowning, as forgetfulness. Both are ways to reach the divine. One is to remember yourself totally and one is to forget yourself totally. Both pain and pleasure can be used but to use them you have to be very, very intelligent.
Whatsoever existence gives you, try to find a way to use it in such a way that it becomes a creative growth situation for you.
Quality of Blade: Awareness
