Why Your Ego Avoids the Pain Your Soul Needs Most

Something that when we were driving here, talking about the pain that we avoid at all costs, right? Human beings, it's avoiding the pain. And the distinction that I made is that our soul actually wants to experience

every aspect

of being a human, but the human in us wants to avoid pain at all costs. And you mentioned, like, if our soul said, I want to develop patience and empathy. You have to go through things to develop those attributes of

being,

you

know, of your soul's highest calling. And imagine you really need to learn something. But imagine you're a soul that literally hasn't understood empathy or humility or surrender or whatever. I remember David Dida saying something about unearned consciousness, which is a really interesting thing, about how you take MDMA or something like that and you find this God thing. Now imagine if there was that same equivalent for you going to school. You're in first grade and you could take something that for three hours helps you feel like a senior at Harvard. You're escaping what you need to learn in first grade. Now, I love that, that analogy. And now you're sitting here having that glimpse, and now you're suddenly teaching everybody. You know, there's all these ways that we avoid suffering. One we all know of it would be alcohol or drugs. There's all kinds of spiritual ways too, like optimism that you grab onto. It's like, oh, I know God will take this. That's true. Are you using that optimism to avoid what you need to feel right now? If you go, God's got it, you're just kind of cocky a little bit, and you're not really surrendering it. And sometimes it's when we finally suffer so much that we fall to our knees and we really lear humility. And when I finally go, God, take this, I don't know what I'm doing, there is a real connection that's earned, that is really special that you'll never get not earned.