A friend from India asked:

Q: How does the unconditioned awareness look at this pain from an objective point of view?

A: It is indeed a good "yoga", so to speak – the harder the path to the seeing, the more it reveals, sometimes...

Why should pain be any different from any other of the content of experience — the changing elements — namely thinking, the senses – seeing, hearing touching, smelling, tasting – and touching, and bodily sensations, that come and go?

Because there is a signal — a pain signal — that originally meant something to the functioning in time and space of this, whatever it is, organism or expression, this instrument.

The question is, what does it mean now — and can we see the imagination about meanings "objectively" as well also, and not take the meaning, and see it so it gives up it's weighty package of ownership and significance as far as an imagined future, and let it be what is is: a passing sensation? Can we also see any avoidance tendency, notice that as well.

Pain and Suffering Distinct

There is a distinction to be made between pain, and suffering. Pain is the raw experience of the ever-changing sensations. Suffering is an extra layer, added by thought, you can call 'psychological' and is that aspect added by virtue or a virtual me and the meanings given to the sensations, in regards to a future.

But where is that future, and what is this "me"? Do you really know? if you think you know, is it helping - is it making you happy and at peace?

Attempts to change thinking don't seem to work — repetition happens — what they call the past or memory.

Every attempt to escape the glue of the sticky flypaper — escape thinking, sensations or whatever — only increases being stuck, if there is a one who is the stuck one, seemingly the subject that is the object of the misery, the "me" or "I am".

What is the way out of the trap? How do we escape the bondage of thought, of thinking, of being a "me"?

There is no escape, as that.

What to do? Activity does not produce stillness, because it is activity, and thinking does not produce non-thinking, since it is thinking.

The only solution is to wake up, wherein there is a seeing one is not that.

How do you do that?

People have been meditating, doing self-inquiry and other practices, formal and informal, for millennia, with mixed results. Sometimes many decades of them end in frustration.

A lucky few seem to escape the grip of the thinking, the bondage to "self".

The key is not to look at them as your paradigms, your model, nor to copy them. The key is to look at yourself. Not by thinking about yourself, but simply to look, observe, see. Be still.

It is an experiment, not a "meditation". It's not even an experiment. It is what it is. Just Be.

There are no words for it, or in it, though words may arise.

Being at peace, free, at ease, is not a state per se. But a Being before being.

What you are before a thing.

What were you before you were born? The Unborn.

You simply identify with Reality - with what you really are – unknown, the "infinite" consciousness or awareness, the immediate – rather than a concept, such as matter or body or me.

Q: My only question is that sometimes physical pain refuses to go away.
I'm not associating pain with suffering.

I understand the threshold of pain increases with time.
But sometimes the pain exists along with the body, like poverty .

But just like we work towards reducing the poverty in our lives we also seek to remove pain from our physical being.

Hence the question.

A: Painkillers or yoga. (laughter)

Or both

Or just endure it or distract yourself, or use it as a spur...

Q: Why not accept it?

A: Go ahead and try.

Q: Yes sir.

A: But the question came up, so doesn’t seem like it’s accepted, and I don’t think you can will that.

Q: True that.

A: So accept that you can’t will acceptance. :)

Q: (Laughter)

A: We are all in the same boat.

Q: I know
But the boat and the ocean is one.

A: Be in the world but not of it.
Only solution I know of…

Can’t solve the world’s suffering

Q: Yes.
I know.

A: Except by starting with one’s own happiness.

Q: Yes sir.

(laughter)