I don’t have the passage in front of me but, K experienced profound loss and sorrow at the death of his brother Nitya, and spoke of his surprise at sorrow’s return, close to his own death. Notwithstanding the beautiful observations in between, seemingly, sorrow bides its time.
Hi LaPerlaNera! 
Particularly when the sorrow is repressed.
Been there, felt that. The strategy for allaying the pain works … for a short while, hours, maybe days. But the pain eventually returns.
If the pain is so intense that it fills your entire head/body/heart, resistance falls away, it’s like trying to resist a tidal wave.
It is also possible to home in on, surrender to the pure pain without any resistance. I’ve done it many times, it’s not all that difficult, you just need to find the pain and drop your ideation around it.
Who or makes the observation? The very fact we think of these things as beautiful means there is still a gap between the observer and his observations.
Again, this implies a gap between the pain and the perceiver or the observer of the pain. When you talk about surrendering to the pain, who is it that surrenders? We are back to the same old question.
Is the pain separate from our activity? Or our own activity is the pain. Our questioning of it, our surrendering to it, our evaluation of it, none of this activity is separate from the pain.
That’s not what it feels like. It feels like in that moment of ‘surrendering’ all there is is pain. It’s not me daring to face the pain head-on, it’s not a pas de deux with pain, the pain is not happening to me … it’s just there in all its hideous glory. The subject and object have melted together. What’s left is pain itself.
No. That’s the whole point. You are still separate from it when you experience it as a feeling. Whose feeling? Who is feeling this pain? The gap between the observer and the observed is still there. What’s left when the observer is the observed is not the pain itself. The pain has totally disappeared, as have you. So there is nothing left at all that can ever be psychologically hurt. Both you and the pain are gone. This isn’t a theory. The pain itself is the theory because it brings into being a self which believes it must deal with the pain. The pain from the heat of standing too close to the fire is a fact and the body can move away, which is another fact. But psychological pain only exists when we think, when we feel, when we operate as though separate from the crisis that has produced the sense of pain. Psychological pain feels real; it feels as real as any physical slap or injury; and it feels that we can do something about it. But real for whom? And what is reality? What is the reality of the observer, the controller, the doer, the one who says, ‘I know!’?
Isn’t this where it all begins, in our knowledge of what to do? When the parent is angry, I know what to do: I lie, I capitulate, I break into tears, I express remorse, I react violently, I run away, I defend myself, and so on, a thousand different escapes depending on the background of my conditioning. And I do exactly the same thing as an adult when I get caught up in any crisis in relationship. We have made a horror of our relationships in this way; we are all responsible for it.
A short while ago I did something that hurt a friend of mine; and he didn’t know what to do about it; and neither did I. So the whole thing was resolved in that moment of revealing the heat of the pain and doing not a thing about it. This is not a theory; this is a most practical way to live. There will always be crises in relationship - there has to be because relationship is a living, moving energy - and these crises generate heat. When you move away from the heat, you make more heat. That’s all.
It is for me. It’s hearsay. It’s as if you said to me: There’s a flower the likes of which you have never seen that grows on the other side of the hill! Unless I can get to the other side of the hill to verify or falsify this, it’s just hearsay to me.
If I knew you well, I might accept your word as true, I trust that Paul knows first-hand of what he speaks and that I understand properly what he wants to say. But I don’t, and I don’t, so I am left shaking my head, stymied. (Which, btw, is quite a lovely place to be.)
But you are living with nettles. That’s easy to verify. Start there.
But they sting. Is there no getting away from this pain?
Is it about you? Can one see as it as an impersonal that it’s neither good or bad
(I’m unsure what ‘it’ refers to, but I’ll assume you mean the situation I described in the OP.)
It involves me, I’m one of the two people in the relationship.
With effort, I can see it this way for a while. But the pull back to seeing-feeling it as personal and bad is strong. Less so than when it first happened, but still.
I don’t think you can cheat grief, it’s painful and messy and it needs to play itself out.
Is it here now? Is there pain right now? Or does it only come into consciousness as you see the word ‘pain’ which triggers the feeling and the memory? Which means first you are going back to it; and then comes the question of getting away from it.
It’s much more Door #2. At any given moment I am just doin’ my thing, really quite content, even happy. It is only when the thought surfaces “I’ve been cancelled!” followed quickly by “Poor me, I must be in terrible pain!” that emotional pain enters the picture. Consciously, at least. It could well be that I am suffering without knowing it consciously.
You are thinking about it. Why not go and see him?
It’s on my mind less and less. But it’s not gone.
He lives far far away. And the ball is in his court.
Then you have done everything. It is finished.
Yep. I think so. But another part of me is still working on it, as if it were a shed with a hole in the roof that I needed to repair. Part of me feels like it’s my responsibility, letting go feels sad and frightening. Or, trulier, the thought of letting go feels sad and frightening. The actual letting go … I don’t know what this feels like, I have not experienced it.
This holding onto things, holding on to the thought of things … it’s a source of pleasure and suffering.
Then all it means is that you don’t know. That’s the whole of it. Then there’s no conflict.
Aw shucks, now what am I gonna do?
It all began when you identified him as your soul brother, which feels like a movement of acceptance and togetherness. But it is not. It is actually a movement of rejection and separation from the rest of the world. I wonder if you see this because it is something deadly serious. It is a movement of arrogance to make one person or one group of people more important than all the others just because we feel we know them better than anyone else. And we take this feeling, which is all about our own limited perceptions and desires, and mistake it for love.
In relationship with another human being there is no such thing as knowing who they are. Because who are you? You don’t even know that.
So the question of what you are going to do now is supremely important; even though it may be expressed flippantly, casually, humorously, it has enormous truth to it because it has no answer.