amare et saper vix deo conceditur
Even a god finds it difficult to love and to be wise at the same time. 

People often ask me if a realized soul or self-master feels any pain once enlightenment is reached.  Sankara is quoted as saying that a normal person cannot tell the difference between a wandering idiot and realized soul as their outward appearances are so similar.  What separates the two is the inner life. 

For the idiot, life is a series of disconnected events.  He experiences the oceans of fate as a piece of driftwood whilst the self-master as a lifeboat of awareness in all seas.  To him it is a dance of light and shimmering on the waters of a dynamic show.  Sometimes he rises with the current and other times he remains steady. 

Again, to the uninitiated observer, both appear to ride the currents.  The one focused on the external life only sees the result-life riding the waves.  While the one with the right sight, a Seeker of Truth, he sees the difference and aspires to mastery of the inner faculties of experience. 

So, in answer to the query at the open of this piece, yes, the self-master feels pain.  He or she knows all of the feelings of any other human being.  The difference between the master and the bulk of humanity is that he knows that his eternal nature never changes.  Feelings cross the awareness like images on a movie screen. 

Thus the key is to feel love at these moments, or more specifically, to feel that union of eternal peace.  Some experience this feeling only during love-making, others in gazing at a beautiful object.  In this universe of endless duality, yin and yang, positive and negative, up and down, divine sexual union is the goal. 

This is not just the physical act of joining another, but the union of two opposing polarities.  One can experience it whenever one dances the perfect paradox of difference.  Phrasing here hints at the methods.  Dance.  The uninitiated fights, the initiated dances. 

Imagine the melee of two drunken brawlers.  Now see the interplay of two aikido masters.  They are wholly different engagements.  This analogy cascades throughout the sensory world.  Two greasy bodies bumping after a night of drunken revelry versus a husband and wife caressing each other in the moonlight on the sand of an endless beach. 

Choose your fate.  Be wise and love.  Dance the seas of fate, 

Gouthum