Acceptance
If we have a certain idea of how we should be, then we cannot accept the experiential truths of our being. If we have the idea that we have to be brave persons, that bravery is a value, then it is difficult to accept our cowardice. If we have the idea that we have to be a saint-like person — compassionate, absolutely compassionate — then we cannot accept our anger. It is the ideal that creates the problem.
If we don’t have any ideals, then there is no problem at all. We are cowards, so we are cowards. And because there is no ideal of being brave people, we don’t condemn the fact. We don’t reject it; we don’t repress it; we don’t throw it into the basement of our being so that there is no need for us ever to look at it. Anything that we throw into our unconscious will go on functioning from there; it will go on creating problems for us.
If a person can accept his reality as it is, in that very acceptance all tension disappears. Anguish, anxiety, despair all simply evaporate. And when there is no anxiety, no tension, no fragmentation, no division, no schizophrenia, then suddenly there is joy, then suddenly there is love, then suddenly there is compassion. These are not ideals; these are very natural phenomena. All that is needed is to remove the ideals because those ideals are functioning as blocks. The more idealist a person is, the more blocked he is.
Psychological pain ends only by accepting it in its totality. Psychological pain does not exist just because of the mere presence alone of some stimulus or reality termed ‘painful.’ Rather, the pain is produced by the interpretation of the fact or reality which produces the tendency to avoid or resist that fact. Try to understand it. Psychological pain is our own creation.
Pain is not inherent in any feeling but arises only after the intent to reject it arises. The moment we decide to reject something, pain arises. Acceptance releases us from all pain.
