Pain is inevitable while suffering is optional !

There is no suffering if you can simply let go the Pain. Pain becomes immaterial in the absence of suffering!

Just learned this yesterday from my spiritual friends, “PriAm”. The knowledge and the positivity they have within is fabulous; they are a source of inspiration in many ways, you guys are awesome!! Learning many inspiration things from you both! Thank you for pumping this positivity and encouraging us to do more and more Purusharth to achieve our final “Goal”!!  I could not hold my thoughts from our last session and couldn’t stop myself writing this, “Pain is inevitable while suffering is optional”. What a profound statement!

To understand this, let me give you a very simple example from our regular life. Say, you’re running and suddenly you hit something on your way and you think, ‘Man, this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The ‘HURT’ part is an unavoidable reality here, but the optional part is the ‘feeling’ of suffering. What we choose to feel from inside is in our control - whether we feel miserable & keep blaming (god, karma or the Nimit) or we accept it gracefully & move on!

The best example we could take to understand is from the story of Lord Mahavir (also known as Vardhamāna, the 24^th Tirthankara of Jainism)

While he was meditating in a forest, a cow herder came there with his cows. He wanted someone to look after the cows so he can go somewhere to finish something else he wanted to do. The cow herder asked Lord Mahavir to look after his cows for a few hours. Lord Mahavir was in deep meditation and did not reply to the cow herder. However, the cow herder went away thinking that Lord Mahavir had heard him.

In a few hours, the cow herder returned and found that his cows were missing. He asked Lord Mahavir, "Where are my cows? What did you do with them?" Lord Mahavir was still in meditation and did not reply. The cow herder got very angry at Lord Mahavir and he picked long nail like thorns and pierced the ears of Lord Mahavir deeply by hammering the thorns in. Even such excruciating agony did not move Mahavir from his meditation. Even bhagwan Mahavir calmly meditating while the pegs were removed. He was so deep into his meditation that he just let the pain go which was inevitable, this helped him to separate himself from a body and concentrate on the liberation of his immortal soul.

Pain could be in any form physical, mental etc.. The “Karma Theory” in Jainism tells that Pain is always inevitable and is not optional, one has to go through it. The thing one can control is the suffering! We should use our mind and the power of our soul with full of positivity such that we could let the pain go and control suffering for any situation!

Love,

LisAnk-Aarav