Love and Suffering

I had a dream I was listening to a Youtube talk by a band/shaman teacher who was giving a lecture about Music and I suppose trance. The song they were singing was that Guns and Roses "Sweet Child of mine." except the lyrics were different. It had to do with trying to get around restraining orders in to see a child from a previous marriage. It was about real Suffering and trying to do everything for the child and the lecture was about how this song brings us to another plane by dragging us into a human suffering and then enabling us to rise above it when the song shifts key (the real version does not I don't think.) and that is when it starts talking more about Love. That true love for a child even the divorce was ugly etc.

There are several reasons why I had this dream. Partially because my Uncle played me a similar song, partially because there is this THING that has forced me to think about my own children and the possibility that this Bliss of cuddling them and being able to hold them and play with them may end. The THING is probably nothing to worry about, but I realized that the truth is that the Bliss will come to an end eventually because at some point my children, my little children, will be teenagers or adults, with problems, with successes, and maybe they won't me around at that point.

Such a Song that encompasses Suffering and is popular is the type of thing people play over and over again. Even though the lyrics were different, that one opening section of music, is catchy but there is also something there. In High school one of the guys next to ours would practice that one or two bars over and over again for hours. He never performed guitar, so it was really more for himself. It didn't bother him to play those notes over and over, and frankly it didn't bother me to listen to it. It might have been one of the very few things he could play, but I recalled some girls visiting him saying that he was so good.
Another guitarist commented in a negative way about this. I am not a guitarist, but I do play other instruments. I think that even though it is a few bars or maybe only one, I think there is something in it.

People think music has to be complicated to be good. But the music a baby craves for can be as simple as a hairdryer or a vacuum cleaner, because it reminds the child of the womb. And shamanic drumming is usually purposefully random and less about song then sound.

But perhaps melody can also take us to these trance like states.

It struck me as extremely wrong when I read that Buddhist Monks cut themselves off from music. But them they also cut themselves off from Romantic love and anything that could possibly cause Suffering. Buddhism, in a way tries to avoid suffering though the main idea is to try and rise above it.

This thinking of being away from my children was so painful that the words that came into my mind was "Let this cup pass from me." Now I'm not a proper Christian (who is though?) But I thought maybe this has something to do with the popularity of the Religion. The fact that the god is the Only God and yet he has to suffer horribly. It just seems so right.
But then the child asks his father to stop it and here's where it seems wrong. The Father, even if he couldn't stop the sacrifice, should have switched places with Jesus at the last second. Because that's what a real parent would do. Well the Story would have so many more possibilities as a simple Fairy Tale then a religion. There is so much more you could do with it. But that's another entry.
The point is in the end Your child will have to go through things and you won't be able to switch places and again that is so much the Human experience.

Anything that can capture that suffering, a song, a story, a soap opera, no matter how cheap or stupid, hits on something that draws us towards it.


In Kung Fu Panda, Master Shifu mentions 2 paths to inner peace. One is meditation for 50 years in a cave without the slightest taste of food or water. That sounds similar to Monastic Life.
The second is through incredible pain. That was Po's way. Through s painful human experience that was relived instead of being blocked out.

Both Christianity and Buddhism seem to offer an out to Human Suffering, Enlightenment and Heaven. And the path there is Love. But in the pagan aspects of both religions, where Gods are not enlightened but just powerful, we see that those powerful beings that have the option of rising above human suffering keep running right back towards it. Yes there is something in Enlightenment. But there is also something in Human experience of Love and Suffering.

I thought about , what if I was like Q in Star Trek and had the ability to stay in my children's childhood forever. But I would know that was fake. I would need to see them grow too wouldn't I? And to be immortal if they were mortal would be even worse too wouldn't it? And so although Suffering that comes with love is painful.. it is not just necessary.. it is a beautiful part of the experience.

We constantly seek Light. To be faster get as fast as it, get faster than it. To travel through time, to be superhuman, to hear and see far, travel distantly, be as hard as stone, as cold as ice, as hot as the sun, be able to do things our ancestors could not. And yet the Universe is full of unliving things able to endure extreme temperatures and speeds and collisions because, they are unliving.
We seek Light constantly, in religion, in technology in our fantasies. Because the Light is the answer or the Light has the answer. But did we ever think that Light has sought us out to find the answer.
If light had a soul (again you can't even prove that humans have souls so don't argue whether Light does.) perhaps Light saw that there might be something more and that light is seeking the answer by going into plants or the first single celled organisms (don't argue how the came to be just that now they are) and that light goes through the whole process of life, of suffering and love, of human consciousness to seek the same answer, while we are seeking light?