Why do We Remember Suffering but not Fulfillment?
Why do we always remember the painful incidents in life? Do you remember joyful incidents with the same intensity as you remember the painful ones? You too experience moments of bliss. The big problem is you forget.
See, when man walks on the sand, he leaves footprints. But when the bird flies over the earth, it doesn't leave footprints. All your sufferings leave their footprints in your mind; you can remember and recall.
The mind thrives on pain, dilemma and suffering. So the mind will always store in stronger intensity and depth, the painful incidents of life.
When you give strength to the painful incidents, you actually get a subtle ego boost at handling so many troubles and suffering in life.
Fulfillment on the other hand doesn't leave behind its memory. Fulfillment doesn't leave any imprint or engram in us. Fulfillment is the gap between suffering. The mind can't remember and cherish the gaps. That is why you think there was no fulfillment. No! There was fulfillment; sometimes you too have a glimpse. Only then you continue to live. Otherwise why to live?
The mind does not store in depth the happy situation and emotions. So we don't even remember the situations where we experienced fulfillment. It is just a vague memory because the mind does not get strengthened with fulfillment.
When you are happy and fulfilled, you don't have a solid identity. You are in tune with, one with Existence. So your identity dissolves in Existence. But that means the mind is not in control of you as it is now. So constantly it drives you towards ego and suffering.
Have you seen how children are so total and fulfilled in themselves? Whatever they do, be it playing, just moving their hands and legs or seeing any object like a flower, they are complete within themselves. We also were like them when we were children. Then as we grow up, why do we lose that fulfillment? Because as the child grows up, around the age of ten or eleven, slowly the feeling of his or her individual identity starts setting in. When the separation from Existence starts happening and the false illusion of an independent existence starts happening, the awareness and experience of innate fulfillment starts fading.
Please be very clear, if there were no fulfilled moments in your life, by now you would have committed suicide! There would have been no reason for you to be alive if you had not experienced moments of fulfillment. The only thing is the mind doesn't allow you to remember and recall those experiences of fulfillment.
The other problem is, in most of our lives, fulfillment happens by accident. So we don't know the science, the chemistry of fulfillment. Bringing the fulfilled feeling to your consciousness, cherishing it and relaxing into it is what is the ultimate spiritual truth or science.
Kalpataru is all about sharing this chemistry of fulfillment.