Excerpt from WHY IS PAIN?
GURURAJ ANANDA YOGI: Why is pain? Very profound. Why should there be pain and the deep agony involved in pain? I will ask you this question in return: why does pain (cause) agony and desperation? Isn’t this just a conceptual thing? What do we mean by deep pain? There is no such thing as pain at all. If pain is conceptual, where is the reality of it? Any conceptualism does not contain reality. It is an experience of the mind that is conditioned to the acceptance of pain, so therefore it is the mind that receives the pain. So what do we do (about the experience of pain)? You remove the mind. When I say to remove the mind, (I mean that) you remove the conceptuality. Then, (as they say) in Zen, there is no mind. And when there is no mind, you will not feel the pain. My mind does not feel any pain because I’m removed from the mind; I’ve risen above the mind. What the mind in its natural state would suffer, I do not suffer, because I’m the observer of the mind.
The mind is made up of conceptualizations. And conceptualizations are nothing else than patternings which we have personally created in the mind. Now this is a natural process in day to day living.
But if you can go beyond this process, you can stand above it and observe it, so that the previous patternings and conceptualizations of the mind do not affect you.
What is there is there, and you cannot destroy it. But you can definitely rise above it. And by rising above it, by becoming the observer, you can see (the mind) in its true value. And the true value is beyond (the mind). For the inner workings of the mind, working in its own values, are mixed up in their own emotions, and they do not know the true value of it. They are involved in it, but they do not know the true value. And the mind cannot know the true value of itself. The mind only evaluates itself according to its own values. Just step one step aside in your spiritual practices and watch (the mind). You will find that all those thoughts of the mind are totally valueless. They are valueless because they do not bring happiness to you. But if you step one step to the side and observe (the mind), you will see the futility of the workings of the mind. In that observance you will say, “This is rubbish, for I, the observer, the real me, is happy.”
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