Pain and Suffering

I return to blogging after almost 3 months. A rather innocuous body condition resulted in restricting my mobility for over 10 weeks. This impacted my work schedule, obviously my time available for blogging reduced. I wondered whether the physical condition ought to have affected my writing, but in some strange way I was restrained.

Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional. Many of us have heard this seemingly simple phrase many times. How many of us are able to experience this into practice?

                                                     

Pain occurs when any part of our body or our mind is disturbed or hurt in any manner. When the wound is physical and a festering one at that, the pain is acute and many times unbearable. When the injury is emotional or mental, the memory of the hurt creates a longing for relief, which aggravates the pain further. At these moments of acute pain at the physical or mental level, our overriding desire is to somehow get rid or get over the affliction. This desire, when not fulfilled within the time of our expectation, ends up in suffering. We suffer the acuteness of the physical pain; we suffer the unending pangs of the emotional drain it creates.                               

 Centuries ago, there lived a scholarly writer named Narayana Bhattadiri, a devotee of Krishna, in Kerala. At a very young age, he was afflicted with Arthiritis. An otherwise devoted scholar became insufferable with pain, and during one of his prayers, he got advice from another poet/scholar that he should sing praises and stories of the Lord, starting from the Lord’s incarnation as “the fish”, to relieve himself of his suffering. Thus was born in his mind, the idea of Narayaneeyam, a classic treatise on Narayana’s various incarnations and stories associated with them. It is known as one of the most outstanding Sanskrit literary works, if only for the sheer use of poetry and language in a divine combination. When the scholar initially set out in his work, he assumed that a few lines would suffice; and he very nearly stopped with the opening stanza, which meant that the Lord is the form of Bliss and Supreme Consciousness, incomparable, without limitations of Time and Space, verily impossible to reveal through scriptures, yet shines in front of us immediately on Realization, and blesses people all around. Once he realized that his Lord was too much in love with him to allow the luxury of being happy with such a short narrative; he got about writing a humungous volume of 1036 stanzas, at the end of which he was blessed with a healthy body by the Lord. 

Identification with pain sows the seed for suffering. The craving for an early relief leads to strengthening this identification, ultimately resulting in suffering. Deliverance from suffering comes with dissociating the mind from the pain and attaching it to a Higher purpose. All suffering ends when we realize that pain is but the other side of pleasure; that the pairs-of-opposites have been enchanting us to the extent of deluding our discriminating intellect. 

Prem & Om
Suresh