Pain

In yesterday's meeting there was a doubt. Suppose you are having a leg pain .

 Is it correct to feel " I am having pain.".  I want to just state a few points here about this. 

Let us analyse it critically. You have a body and the leg is part of it. What is a pain?. A pain is a sensation created by the brain with the help of neural signals that something wrong in some part of the body so that we attend to it. Now we can understand it like this . The leg and the brain together is creating this sensation of pain. Now the crucial statement was " I am having pain". 

So in result you have accepted that my body is I. Whatever happened to my body is me. 

So i want to narrate this from two perspectives

1) Ego:  

Let us assume that I am the body. So the pain experienced in the body is really me. So it is correct to say "I am having pain" instead of saying " My leg is having pain". 

Oh what a pain this is for me. I was so fine before.Ever since i had this pain it is hindering everything.

Or 

I have tried so many treatments for this pain and nobody could cure it. Now i have to bear it out and so on. 

Note: Here there is a commentary by the mind which keeps you engrossed in thoughts and increases the pain sensation. This depends on you believing strongly that your leg is you!!!. We all know my leg is not me. I am just a possessor of an equipment called leg. I am not this leg . And yet we listen to all this . The moment there is a me in the mind about the pain it can start a commentary or narration. This is because you can be projected as a body into the past where you were well and  compared with your present state and so on. Having created your identity as the body, the mind can make you believe in anything. Consider this. Suppose you had a video camera and a part of it broke. Would you say "I broke". Even though you do feel strongly about your video camera , it is not considered you. It is true that the video camera that you own creates a greater impact than another person's video camera, but there only is a sense of possession but no sense of identity. You are a witness to the fact that the video camera that you own broke. 

2) Self (Atman) 

I am this pure consciousness or awareness and i am limitless and without any blemish. I see that this body is experiencing some pain in the leg. But it is not me. It is only an appearance in the infinitude of Me. I was always there in time. Only thing i got manifested in this temporary thing called body for a while so the body being an object would have imperfections and it is natural that there would be pain . I am just witnessing it.

Note : Here the real identity realized what is what. It distinguished that the body is actually an object and not a subject. The only subject is the self which is unchanging  and immortal. Your identity is attached to that, not to the body which is just a fleeting thing in time. Any name and form is limited in time and space. Just like that the body is limited in time and space and subject to imperfections. But I am not that. 

The same process can be seen for the mind also. All the thoughts that crowd in your mind are also associated with you. That is why you value them so much. If you understand that the mind is also an object ( created by neural networks in the brain) , and that the self is a witness to it , you will never feel identified with the thoughts in the mind. 

Note what i am saying. I am not saying that there wont be any thoughts. Thoughts would be there. But you feel that you are not those thoughts themselves but as someone who can witness them from an unchanging platform called the self and that unchanging platform is what I am.

Spiritual life is all about abiding in the real identity by dropping the ignorance.

You can see it is all about identity . Unless you understand who you really are , the experiences wont make sense to you and it would drag you into this world of misery and torture. You take responsibility for so many things for which you dont even have a notion and based on lies.

It is more of a habitual thinking all through your life which has created this identity for you. The more repeated these thoughts are the stronger your belief in it becomes , The stronger your belief the hard it is to strike it out. The first step is to start unbelieving your own thoughts and de-valuing them except for the facts. As Robert Adams used to say " Your mind is not your friend".