Time is a Great Healer
There's a story of a king in olden times, when
the world was a simpler place and kings had power, who asked his advisors to
help him with a problem. He was moody and was sometimes elated and at other
times depressed. Could his advisors give him something that will bring him down
when he was too high and lift him up when he was down. His advisors thought
for some time and consulted all manner of people before producing the solution.
They presented the king with a ring and said when he was up he should look at
it to bring him down, and when he was down he should look at it to be uplifted.
On it was the inscription:
This, too, will pass
Time is the great healer. However traumatic an emotional experience is or however desperate the situation, time will heal it. Similarly, the euphoria that comes with the beginning of a new venture will have its edges knocked off. An event that seems like the end of the world when it happens becomes simply another hill in the landscape of the past.
What inhibits this natural decay of emotional trauma is reliving the experience. When you regret an experience or replay it over and over again in your mind you revive the emotional impact. You have to learn to ‘let go’ and ‘move on’.
I've pointed out that part of spiritual development is that the highs and lows
get evened out, to be replaced, eventually, by a state of permanent euphoria.
This comes when there is no emotional attachment. This isn't to say there is
no emotional feeling but because there is no emotional attachment to the feelings
they can be experienced in the same way as one experiences emotion in a movie.
You are absorbed in the movie but when it is over you continue your life. Advanced
mystics can travel to the ends of the galaxy, they can experience the death
of a star as it is sucked into a black hole.
There is no madness – there are only experiences. Madness is to be swept away by the experience. This is why real teachers of mysticism work on developing character. There is no point in being able to travel to the ends of the world if it destroys you in the process.
