About: Why change feels so difficult
The Guide teaches that life and pleasure are the same—people cannot live without pleasure. So when, as children, we found ourselves experiencing unpleasant feelings, we attached our pleasure current, or pleasure principle, to the unpleasant experience.
This is the crossing of pleasure and pain.
This is why negativity is so hard to shed—it contains pleasure.
We then go through life unknowingly recreating this same unpleasant experience so we can activate our life force. This is why negativity is so hard to shed—it contains pleasure.
If the feeling was frustration, we will recreate frustration. If the atmosphere was chaotic, we will recreate chaos. If the pattern was need-rejection-collapse, we will recreate “I want affection, I am hurt—I collapse to stop the pain.”
Other patterns to look for, that may reveal the presence of negative pleasure, include:
- Constant conflict in relationships
- Always feeling overlooked
- Repeatedly rescuing others
- Chronic disappointment
Some forms of negative pleasure can even involve repeated physical abuse. In these cases, painful as they are, the life force has become attached to the intensity of contact.
Recall that we are born into duality. So when a child grows up in an intense emotional environment, we end up mistaking intensity for aliveness. Our nervous system concludes that intensity equals life.
Peace, therefore, feels dead, whereas conflict feels alive.
We need to discover where our life force has become attached to destruction, seeing how we are electrified—our life force is activated—by what’s now negative pleasure.
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Learn more in Finding Gold, Chapter 10: Intensity: An obstacle to self-realization
Turning the tide
Our negative situations generate tension fields of energy. We may not know what life would be like without these humming around us. As with our childhood environment, they have come to feel familiar and normal—they are just always there.
As a result, it also becomes routine to distract and numb ourselves. Eating, drinking, smoking and spending, as well as overworking and compulsive busyness, are some of the ways a weak ego tries to let go and overcome.
These pseudo-pleasures may feel like short-term relief from the tension. And these things may even deliver a hit of “aliveness.” But they go on to create more problems which we then also try to escape from.
It is important to realize that all energetic currents are self-perpetuating. Once they get rolling, they take on a life of their own.
When we align with our Lower Self—or with our distractions and strategies for avoidance—this gains momentum, making it harder and harder to break free. It creates vicious circles that deplete us.
The good news is that it works the same when we align our will with God’s will.
Over time, it becomes easier and easier to make the necessary effort. Eventually, our efforts will feel effortless, as our life force reorients and replenishes itself.
So while spiritual laws may feel hard to align with at first, doing so eventually becomes easier—and far more fulfilling.
It takes real maturity to be able to tolerate a negative tension field while working to dismantle it. But the longer we wait to look within and transform our darkness, the harder it will be to do so.
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Learn more in Bones, Chapter 16: How pleasure gets twisted into self-perpetuating cycles of pain.
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