Pain is new for the sufferer, old for the observer – Wisdom on Wisdom 5

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Pain is always new to the sufferer but loses its originality for those around him.
Alphonse Daudet, we are born alone in this world and we leave alone from this world and how alone we are during our life journey also we come to know when we suffer pain, when initially say we have a fracture, we have an accident, we get a disease, at that time our loved ones may come and support us, they may encourage us, they may solace us, they are there with us but if it is a chronic injury, if it is a problem whose pain is persistent, then eventually how long can others stop their lives for being with us? They also have their own life and they have to carry on. So when the pain attacks us, that pain seems to us to be new but for others they say, oh if say a person wakes up and every day says my back is paining, especially when we grow old and old age back pain is often a common problem. Now for others who may be especially those who are younger, for them it’s just a same old thing, so what’s new? They may not speak it so bluntly, so what’s new? But how much can they empathize with that problem when it is the same problem coming again and again? The key difference in the experience of pain is that for the experiencer the pain seems new, new not in the sense of pleasantly new but new in the sense of unpleasantly, sometimes horribly new and for the observer it seems to be the same old thing, especially in the medical profession there is a phenomena called as compassion fatigue which medical caregivers suffer from, that means when they administer to the patients whether it’s doctors or nurses or other medical staff, so they can over a period of time because they see so much suffering they can become desensitized, they can become deadened to the suffering and especially say somebody is a orthopedic surgeon and every day they see different kinds of or costly fractures, somebody’s hand has broken apart, somebody’s leg has broken apart, somebody’s core has come out, all kinds of things they keep seeing, now initially for them also it is shocking but it is almost natural that when we see so much pain we ultimately have a certain a capacity to which we can see human pain and stay sensitized to it, when the pain that we witness around us exceeds our threshold and the way we cope with it is by desensitizing ourselves to the pain, either we try to go away from the situation of the pain if we can’t then we desensitize ourselves and by desensitizing ourselves we persevere, so what is the solution if both from the observer’s perspective and the experience’s perspective, if the pain is going to be there again and again what can one do, ultimately we experience the pain based on our consciousness, for example suppose a person is a porter and that porter is carrying a very heavy luggage a 20 kg, 30 kg, 40 kg, big luggage and the porter will be groaning under the burden of that luggage but imagine if somebody has given that porter a 20 kg suitcase filled with currency, I says all this is yours take it and the porter may just carried and ran home although that physically the weight is still there, that weight is not felt because the consciousness is not at that time in the body, the consciousness is suppose a person is carrying it on one’s head or carrying it one’s shoulders or in one’s hands also whatever it is, the person’s consciousness is not in the bodily part which are carrying the weight, the person’s consciousness is in all the things that the money can purchase, all the things that they hope that they can solve, problems they hope they can solve, all the pleasures that they can enjoy and because the consciousness is elsewhere in something which is very pleasant so one doesn’t feel the pain, so to a large extent how much we experience pain depends on what is the focus of our consciousness, certainly when a person is going through pain at that time they need a social network of loud ones who come and offer support but eventually once they understand that I had to cope with this myself then they have to find some other redirector for their consciousness, some other focus for their consciousness and that focus at best be spiritual, we may just think I can watch TV, I can play video games on my hospital bed, on my sick bed, that’s okay but there is nothing higher, nothing sublimating, nothing very spiritual about these things and it is when we face a pain at the material level trying to find relief at another material level is actually counterproductive because even that material thing is going to be sooner or later let us down, it is going to frustrate us, so if instead we seek shelter in the spiritual, we focus on developing, training our consciousness to redirect towards spiritual reality, we practice meditation, we engage in prayer, we study spiritual wisdom texts that raise our consciousness from the material level to the spiritual level, then we will be able to be able to rise upwards and both from the experience perspective if they can find shelter in focus on spiritual reality, the highest spiritual reality is God, Krishna, other people will come and go but Krishna is always with us, in fact he is always not just with us, he is within us and he can help us when we redirect our consciousness towards him, when we are not thinking constantly of the pain that we are experiencing, when we are not focusing on the pain, then we experience the pain much lesser and in our relationship with Krishna, in our absorption in Krishna, we experience a profound relief, a sublimating joy and thus whatever life sends our way, if we can cope with it, not in agonizing over the newness of the pain but in relishing the newness of the serenity that we experience in our absorption in Krishna and for observers also, they can offer emotional support to the person but the best thing that they can do for such a person is to inspire them to take spiritual shelter and in that way by the experiencer’s initiative and the observer’s assistance, if the consciousness can be redirected, then instead of agonizing in the newness of the pain, they can relish the newness of spiritual experiences.
Thank you.