The cognitive shift🔗

A small story:

Once a disciple was walking with a Zen^\* master when a flock of geese flew overhead. The master asked, ‘What are they?’ The disciple replied, ‘They are wild geese, master.’ The master asked, ‘Where are they?’ The disciple replied, ‘They have flown away.’

The master suddenly caught the disciple’s nose and twisted it. The disciple cried out in pain. The master said, ‘You say they have flown away, but they have been here from the start.’ The story says the disciple became enlightened in that moment.

This story may sound very strange, but this is the way of most Zen* masters. Pain has a tremendous value in awakening you to reality. That is why it has been used by many masters to awaken the sleeping disciple. Normally what do we do when someone is in pain? We console. Unknowingly we enable the person to continue to sleep. But the master is not interested in consoling. His only interest is in awakening you. In the moment of great pain, the mind stops, there is only pain. In that moment, the Truth is delivered! In the story you can see that in the moment of pain, the disciple’s inner space was ready to receive the Truth from the master, and the master delivered it!

Pain can become a very creative energy. It can become a remembrance of god. It can become prayer. It can become meditation. It can become awareness. It can cause tremendous transformation in you.

An important secret of life that you need to understand is that if you become aware of something, you can get rid of it very easily. If you are not aware of it, there is no question of getting rid of it. It remains with you. The pain is a pain because it exists in your unconscious, not in your awareness. Your fear of facing the pain allows it to exist and grow more and more like a tumor. A master will simply remove this tumor through his master surgery’! When it leaves you, you transform into a new person. Once a devotee asked me, ‘Swamiji, I understand that the surgery is needed for my inner space to be cleansed. But can the master use some pain-killer while doing the ‘master surgery’?’

What is the attitude needed to deal with the painful ‘surgeries’ of the master? Sometimes, just the awareness itself will dissolve the pain. Many times, I will just point at the pain, nothing else. It will simply disappear and it will evaporate.

Now, what is the correct attitude to deal with these painful ‘surgeries’? It is having complete trust that whatever ‘pain’ the master causes, is only for your good and nothing else. The ‘surgery’ itself is because of his boundless love and compassion for you. If this is clearly understood, then even if it hurts, you will go through it with deep gratitude for what the master is doing to you. I can say that the painkiller from the master’s side is the love and compassion the master showers with just a look.

One more thing is that the pain is also because you start thinking it is a pain and labeling it so. The master can teach in just two or three seconds what will ordinarily take a lifetime or a few hundred years or a few births. The master is intense life. He will simply remove the ‘tumor’ and throw it away. So, even if it is intense, it is better to go with the master than with life because it is a very quick process. Also, if you understand what the master is doing to you, you can enjoy it as the ultimate happening in your life.

One more thing: the pain you will experience continuing life with the ‘tumors’ will be much worse than the pain you experience when the master removes them. Removing a ‘tumor’ will take hardly a few minutes; the master just removes it, over.

Once you understand this process, you will no longer label the transformation as pain. Instead you will welcome it. You will not only welcome it, you will feel thankful that what was lurking deep down in your unconscious has been brought up and removed.

Pain is actually the absence of attention, so the solution is ‘giving your presence’. There is a simple and beautiful self-healing meditation technique that channels your presence into the diseased limb or the suffering mind. You can try it out the next time you experience pain or suffering. It is definitely a better option than painkillers, whose side-effects sometimes are worse than the original complaint.

Just try this. Suppose you have pain in your leg, or you are suffering because of some external incident. Lie down in a dark room. Make a conscious effort to forget about your whole body, focusing only on the spot which is causing you pain. If it is mental suffering, then forget your whole body and focus only on that incident that caused you suffering. As you experience the pain, deliberately drop the word ‘pain’ from your mind.

Your mental chatter will continue to tell you that you feel pain. Switch it off. Feel deeply; experience with an open mind. Look

into what is happening inside your mind. You will soon see that your mind was just exaggerating the pain. Put all your awareness on the center of the pain, and it will soon shrink to become just a tiny point of pain. Concentrate completely on this point and you will discover in a sudden moment that the pain disappears, and in its place there is bliss!

You can use this as a technique for dissolving physical pain in any part of your body.

When you are faced with physical pain, just witness the feeling of pain in that part of your body in a relaxed way. You will see that first, there might be a surge of pain, but soon the pain reduces to a spot and disappears. What happens is that the moment you get hurt physically, energy supplied by your own body intelligence rushes to that part to heal it. The energy rush is what you label 'pain'. If you witness the energy rushing and healing in a relaxed way, the pain disappears and healing happens. If we just understand this, we will not resist and suffer the pain, we will cooperate with the natural healing energy of the body.

I can say this from my own personal experience. Once somebody closed the door of the car on my finger. People around me got agitated and ran around to get first aid. I simply told them not to bother.

As my finger swelled, I just watched clearly what was happening inside my body. I could feel the energy rushing from my navel center to my finger. I could clearly see the body intelligence responding to the emergency on its own. It healed on its own.

Your own inner ambulance system is what you call pain!

The witnessing focus that you give the pain will make you realize that you are more than a mere body. You will touch your energy base and realize that you are more than the body-mind.

Watch the pain intensely but without attaching the word 'pain' and the meaning 'suffering' to it. For a brief moment the pain may seem to intensify, but soon it will dissolve.

Actually, the body is intelligent enough to allow energy to flow to the part of the body that is asking for energy. But you resist that energy flow by labeling it as 'pain'. Just allow the energy to flow by infusing full awareness into that part of the body. Just look at the energy flow with curiosity. Be a complete outsider; do not participate in the process. Just let the energy flow to that area and work on it. You will see it heal.