Transcribed Talk – J. Jaye Gold
Today I’m wearing military fatigues because I want to talk about one of my heroes, Colonel Kurtz from the movie Apocalypse Now. Colonel Kurtz was the officer who lived in the jungle who they thought kind of lost his marbles. Marlon Brando played Colonel Kurtz. They sent Martin Sheen out to kill him because they thought he’d become a renegade crazy person, but I had a slightly different view of his fanatic philosophy, especially given those times. In a way I’m joking, and in a way, I’m not joking, because he had a certain philosophy about pain that I learned something from, and I want to talk a little about that. Our attitude, our perspective, our outlook on pain have brought us to a place where our lives are dedicated to eliminating it. I have a different point of view—that there is something valuable about pain—that this guy Colonel Kurtz came to understand.
I’ll start by telling you something I did some years ago. Over the years, I’ve gone on expeditions to some really remote places in Asia and South America where there was very little or no possibility of assistance if something went wrong, especially if it were something medical or physical. When I came to Santa Barbara years ago, I went on an expedition with a number of people, most of whom had never been in circumstances like that before. A couple years before that, when the group was just getting going and I knew we were going to be taking an expedition to a really remote place in the Andes, I decided that it would be a good idea if I developed some emergency medical skills. So I took a first aid course, then the Emergency Medical Tech course, then I got the certification, then the paramedic certificate, then I rode on the 911 truck and worked in the emergency room at Cottage Hospital. I went through those things for a couple of years and learned quite a bit about how to deal with emergency medical situations.
One thing I did on the 911 truck was patrol San Marcos Pass Road. The worst time to have a shift was Friday or Saturday night on the ready point to go up and down the pass because of the drunk people—especially the motorcyclists—coming down from Cold Springs Tavern. It was rare that there wouldn’t be a motorcycle down on the road somewhere. Something you learn by doing this is that no matter how badly a person is injured, you have an excellent chance of helping them if they can talk to you, or at least if they are conscious enough to answer your questions by nodding. If a person is only mildly afflicted with something, like in the first stages of insulin deprivation, it’s not difficult at all to be of help.
On the other hand, if the person is not able to communicate to tell you what’s wrong, there’s almost nothing you can do. Picture someone lying on the ground unconscious or uncommunicative, and all you can do is look at them. You can’t tell what’s wrong unless there’s a severe external wound or that person has a bone fracture or a dislocated shoulder. One of the most agonizing situations is when you encounter a person who is unconscious, but you don’t know why. They may not be that sick, but they could get worse, and you wouldn’t know what they needed. You do things like put sugar under their tongue in case they’re experiencing insulin deprivation or are in shock, but it may be nothing of the sort. Unless you can ask them where it hurts, you have nothing going for you.
That’s why I want to talk about the value of pain, because there is an analogy to our situation. We’re looking to remove the obstacles to our natural gift of consciousness, our natural gift of connection to the force that created and maintains us and will someday evaporate us. In order to remove those obstacles, we have to be cognizant of what they are. Something that I’ve learned over the years, and probably some of you have learned as well, is that the most accurate, reliable barometer of something being wrong with you is your feeling of pain. Unlike the fallen motorcyclist, it may not be physical pain; it may be emotional pain. If you feel a negative reaction to something, that reflects some disharmony that exists in you. That is an absolute formula and a precious barometer for us. I’m not talking about if someone puts a gun to your head; we don’t have to talk about that since no one is putting a gun to your head, and you’re constantly having negative reactions of a lesser degree.
If you call a medical office and say, “I have aches and pains,” the doctor might say not to take any aspirin that morning but to just come in so she can check you out. If you don’t follow the instructions and you take painkillers, when you go to the doctor and she asks where it hurts, you can’t really say. What can the doctor do? If you can say where it hurts, then that doctor has a place to start. We’re really in a very similar position. If we know where it hurts, if we know what is giving us trouble and where and when or how our trouble is, we know where to start because we see some disharmony. That emotional pain, that bad feeling, is a doorway; it allows an entryway for us to explore where an obstacle might be.
Every negative reaction to life, to some external stimulus, reflects some disharmony, some obstacle in us. That’s the law. If you can follow the path of your negative reactions, if you can follow them scientifically, impartially, accurately, precisely, you can come to see the obstacles you have to consciousness, to freedom, to knowing the divine within yourself, or whatever words you use to describe the feeling of peace and love.
Now that presents a very big problem, because you dedicate your life to eliminating pain, and you gravitate to whatever situations and people will help you remove those circumstances of emotional discomfort. If you have a negative reaction to a certain person, you’ll avoid that person if you possibly can. If you have a job and some element of it gives you trouble, you may try to get transferred to another part of that business. Over and over again, if you study the nature of your day, you’ll see that your day is mapped out by an avoidance of circumstances that cause you to react negatively.
Now think of that in terms of this analogy we’re talking about. The value of pain is that it’s an indicator and a doorway; it’s our most dependable gauge of where to look for obstacles. The elimination of pain means the elimination of the indicator of where the obstacle is. I want everybody to think of themselves in terms of this formula that I’m presenting. This is not a theoretical concept; this is a very practical concept that applies to you and to what you do. In fact, if you’re sitting in an uncomfortable place or in an uncomfortable position, rather than seeing what that could indicate about you and what you could learn about yourself, you will probably alter your position. The pattern of your day, the map of your movements in life, both in the microcosm and macrocosm—what city you move to, what position you move to, who you look at and who you don’t look at—will be absolutely predetermined by that which causes you discomfort, by that which causes you to feel some negative reaction in yourself.
One of the first problems we teachers have to face is how to get you to hold still so you can make use of these precious indicators rather than try to get rid of them. All your life you’ve been taught only one thing—to avoid. A healthy person who is taught that gets good at it and learns how to circumvent difficulty. Now I come along and have to teach you to resist avoiding—especially small discomforts—because they are the indicators, the doorways, the place to start.
It is no small endeavor to teach a person to hold still, and so we have points of view that help us do that. We have tools that help a person be less solid. They help us become a little lighter so we can sit still when things happen; we can learn to study our negative emotions and see what they indicate—rather than try to change them. But even with the methods we have, the programming we’ve undergone our whole lives is always there churning beneath the surface, telling us over and over again that we can improve our situation by avoiding what’s unpleasant to us. That voice in us dies very slowly—very, very slowly.