Giselle: I was wondering if we could have a discussion on physical pain and managing that in the light of what I know I am. When I am in what I call foreground pain I feel much more likely to be bad tempered, rude or upset. With the background pain of everyday sometimes it is my teacher but still it is hard. Of course I know I have to bear it but sometimes it’s too much because it is most days more or less.
Sundari: I just had a zoom satsang with a good friend of ours who is in hospital with pain that has no known origin. Chronic pain is a strange and mysterious problem, one that doctors have shied away from until recently. These days there is serious research going on in this field. What is known is that whatever the origin of the pain, all pain is ‘real’. The body has a pain registering mechanism that informs the brain when something is wrong, so we can do something about it. But now we know that the cells that register pain, called glial cells, don’t always switch off once the signal has been delivered to the brain.
We don’t know why yet. The brain is such a powerful instrument, with such plasticity, that it can create a vasana for the pain when there is no more actual pain. But you are still feeling the pain. Doctors typically dismiss patients with chronic pain of this sort because they don’t know how to treat it, so they just say it’s all in your head. Well, of course it is because everything is registered only in the brain. But that does not mean you are not feeling it.
Research has uncovered that there are two basic ways we experience physical pain. The first is called nociceptive pain, which is pain the brain registers as a direct result of tissue or bone injury. This usually ends once the physical injury is healed. The second is neuropathic pain, which is pain the brain registers as a result of nerve injury, such as peripheral neuropathy, and shingles. Nerve injury can be the cause of the most awful chronic pain conditions.
The third category of pain is the most baffling, and it is called nociplastic pain, which is the result of an error in the brain’s danger detection and pain processing abilities. This is the kind of pain that has no current known origin. There may have been injury from whatever cause in the past (whether from injury or treatment, such a chemotherapy, or radiation) that the body has processed, but it is no longer current. Yet the body feels in pain, sometimes terrible pain.
I heard the story of a young man who stepped on a big nail which went right through his shoe, and seemingly, his foot. When he got to the hospital, he was in such agony that the doctors had to knock him out with the strongest pain treatments available to work on him. Once he was out, they removed his shoe to find that the nail had not gone through his foot, but between his toes, only superficially causing blood loss. Yet this man’s pain was real.
As inquirers, we must ask ourselves, when the body is in pain, are you in pain? If the body is in pain, you are not in pain and you are not the pain. You are the knower of the pain. You cannot be what you know. You observe the body in pain and do what is necessary to heal it, like guna management/mind control, the appropriate medication, diet, exercise, etc. That said, it is much harder to experience peace of mind when the body is in pain, so inquiry can be compromised at this time. It is human to be more irritable because it takes a lot of energy to maintain sattva, when the body is already stressed. Although the body is inert and depends on the Subtle body (mind) to exist, nonetheless a body sick or in pain affects the Subtle body making peace of mind (sattva) very difficult. When I have a bad pain day, I know it will take more from me, so I symbolically throw a grappling hook into sattva and keep the mind steady that way.
As you are aware, the Subtle body is mithya (apparently real not always present, and always changing), and You, Consciousness are satya, (that which is real, ever-present, and unchanging). Even though the Gross and Subtle body has no effect on you as the Self, it has an apparent existence, so ‘you’ experience it either in health or in pain. There is no escape from that. Self-knowledge does not immunize us against physical or psychological pain, it just puts it in perspective. The body is a counter across which experience is transacted, all experiences good or bad are mithya, they have a beginning and an end. Discriminating satya from mithya 100% of the time is freedom.
The Subtle Body has a similar relationship to the Gross Body as Consciousness has to mithya (the apparent reality). There is an interdependence from the jiva’s perspective—but not from Consciousness’s point of view because the body and Consciousness exist in different orders of reality. So if the body is miserable, the misery does not come to you, the Self, only to the body/mind. When the Subtle or Gross body experiences chronic pain, there is no point denying it. The point of understanding that nothing in the mithya world is real is not denial. Denial will not make mithya (the effects of ignorance or duality) go away. Only knowledge, the ability to discriminate the Self from the objects that arise in you, will mitigate physical or mental pain by seeing it as not-Self.
As health or illness is a result of karma, if we superimpose what belongs to Isvara onto the individual or jiva then we are thinking as a person, not as Consciousness. This means that you think the karma comes to you and therefore the suffering belongs to you—because you are identified with the body/mind. If you know that you are Consciousness, you see the suffering taking place in the mind (Subtle Body). So, you are free of suffering, both mental and physical, and the karma burns up when it burns up.
The karma comes from Isvara, the Causal body. Isvara is called karma phala datta, which means “the one who delivers the fruits of the action“. Karma is simply the endless playing out of the gunas according to what stands in our Subtle body ‘account’. There is no karma for the Self, and as the body is just meat there is no karma for it either. The karma that comes to the body is only ever “in” the Subtle Body, not the physical body. It seems to take place in the physical body because the physical body is attached to or ‘within’ the Subtle Body, and the Subtle Body is ‘within’ Consciousness (you).
Of course, it takes extreme dispassion to deal with chronic illness or any pain we can do nothing about. This is where dispassion and karma yoga is so important from the perspective of the jiva. One can work with Isvara regarding illness and body pain by one’s attitude to the thoughts that give rise to illness/pain and to the thoughts which come as a result of illness/pain. Karma yoga, which is taking appropriate action, surrendering results, and consecrating the suffering to Isvara, is perfectly suited for dealing with anything mithya throws at us. Even though coping with pain, which is rajas, makes the mind dull (tamasic), and it is very difficult to maintain a sattvic mind when the body is in a lot of pain, it can be done with karma yoga and Self-knowledge.
With much love
Sundari
