Beyond the fluff and everything, I'm a curious seeker on the path to awakening. A journey towards self discovery, asking the simple yet complex questions about the universe. I love paradoxes, they stretch the limits of our minds!
During my studies, I've been dabbling with the concept of pain versus suffering trying to understand them from a wider perspective. Life on Earth is hard, there's a lot of mess down here and achieving anything worthwhile requires huge efforts. In a messy world, pain becomes unavoidable. You don't need to be good or bad, lucky or unlucky to experience pain, it just happens and we've all had our share of pain from time to time. It could be argued that we're on average more sad than happy but this depends on the perspective you're looking from which is another topic of it's own.
Now, suffering is of a different nature. While pain is unavoidable, suffering can be reduced to near zero instead of exaggerating it out of proportions. Many of us suffer unnecessarily. Take the example of a dog bite, yes, it's painful and can become life threatening but the potential of dying from it is slim. However, some people make it the end of the world and believe they're going to die, they start worrying in their mind about when it will happen, things they'll miss about life, what will happen to them on the other side and a bunch of unnecessary things. This causes an excessive 'mental activity' which leads to endless suffering.
In many cases, pain is only transient but if one wishes one can always add to it and suffer more.
Thinking that this will be very vital on the journey, I started practicing it in my daily life trying to reduce suffering to a bare minimum. Oh boy, the results were unexpected! I was unfazed, rock solid, no nonsense with my attitude towards suffering. It was near mechanical, find the source of the pain, keep it there, don't add any flavors, thrills or frills to it. just let it be. it will pass. good. next! I was amazed by how our mind fabricate this endless drama that it plans on adding to the pain. Like we cooking something here huh??? no thanks, chef I'm taking it raw now.
Anyways, I must say that seeing the pain as it is has helped in achieving some 'emotional stability' but every now and then things tend to spiral out of control so I guess it requires some watchful eyes and keen awareness. Otherwise, the mind will keep sneaking up on you making you forget!
What do you think? Is pain really transient?
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