Bad Feelings and Present Time Experience.

As a species we are blessed with a vast intelligence. We have a complex system of inputs to this intelligence, an ability to be hurt and an ability to recover from hurt. For most of us the sense of pain or hurt in any way means something is not right. it hurts and it needs to stop hurting.

Hurts get recorded and continue to play out the recording is if it is still happening and happening. Most hurts happen and then stop.

The recordings then continue and make it seem to the person that the hurt is still happening. When dealing with these recording then the sense of pain means not that harm is happening but that we are paying attention to a recording and not to our nature or to present time.

For most men getting to have a good life that is not spent struggling with recorded painful experience (bad marriage, divorce, boring work, exhaustion, addictions, loneliness to mention a few examples) means getting to have the full abilities that come with our humanness and getting to live with our attention on the present in cooperation with close, reliable others. With such a life the recordings from the past turn to emotional and physical discharge and get worked through quickly and end.

Pain means then that we are away from ourselves and the present. Joy and love and most good human experience is a present time experience with others.

Paul Whyte