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In a message dated 12/27/01 8:54:07 GMT Standard Time, [log in to unmask] writes: > one of the great changer of perceptions is pain, which is > why I'm so suspicious of desires for painlessness This is so true - yes, drugs can do it too, though I have always found that I end up worn so thin and tired with them, that I cant follow through the changes till some time afterwards........ To be really alive and alert means recognising pain since it is there all the time in many subtle forms...... sometimes I envy people who seem to be able to walk round in a half sleep, with most of what is around them/what they are experiencing screened out. But I also know that I simply cant rest and be content at that level of perception. I have had some very dramatic experiences - been lied to, had my own experience denied obliterated. Having reclaimed myself I could never be content to slip back into the mist. Happiness is a pretty static state, it is pain that moves, shifts, forces change. The tragic thing is that so often the response to pain is blind fury and rejection, so the chance of new perception is blocked off. I have seen that in my own family recently, and I feel I am seeing it on a world scale too. I see it as the role of poetry especially (and of all 'creating') to address pain and learn from it. A demand for courage, usually in very tiny and fleeting glimpses, which is generally all that we can manage. Fragile. Liz (as I read back through this I realise that 'pain' takes on shifting meanings here, from physical, to the psychic and the political...... but I do think they are all related)