Freedom From Pain (Vedanta and Pain)

Vedanta Kesary, 1992 March, p.82-9

The human personality is not dichotomous, says Vedanta, it is trichotomous. We are not just body + mind. We are body + mind + Atman, the true, inner Self. Further, we are essentially the Self; the body and mind are just the outer shells. The Self is free, unborn, deathless, and is the seat of bliss and consciousness. The body and mind are not conscious in themselves. They are material. They appear to be conscious only because of their seeming proximity to the Self. Somehow the Self seems to have got involved and identified with the body and mind.

It is a very curious, irrational and inexplicable amalgam of the body, mind and something beyond both that we experience and speak of as I. And it is this I, a deluded, ignorant, bound that experiences pain and suffers. But the real I is the Self, which is untouched by pain and suffering. When the identification with our body and mind is snapped off, the Self stands alone—absolutely free from all limitations and eternally immersed in its own ineffable bliss and freedom.

What is described above is not a theory. It is a fact that has been tested, verified and confirmed umpteen number of times by illumined souls from times prehistoric. Their researches and experiences have been recorded in a section of the Vedas which is well-known as the Upanishads or, more popularly, as Vedanta ('Essence of the Vedas'). These are not books to be read, memorized and believed in. These are invaluable spiritual records which can form the working hypothesis of the truth-seeker.

We accept their basic premises tentatively and make a beginning. When we practise the suggested methods we discover in time the truth of those premises. We are not asked to 'believe' what Vedanta says. We are invited to 'test' it and verify it for ourselves by actual experience. What has been experienced by one can be experienced by another if he follows the same path. What truth was intuited ages ago can be intuited even today. What encounter with the transcendent 'Reality' every illumined soul has had can be had by you and me too. Thus there is no scope in Vedanta for dogmatism, exclusivism, fear, and mere belief. Vedanta is a broad, airy, lighted path meant for the strong, the level-headed, the courageous—in short, for the sane.

So, then, we find that the Vedantic analysis goes to the very root of the pain-problem. The immediate and visible causes of pain are many. But the root-cause is our identification with the body and mind. As is evident, all pain is associated with either the body or the mind or both. So long as the real Self continues to feel its oneness with them, pain will remain.

Modern medicine may be able to suppress the pain partially or totally for a time, but it cannot free us from pain once and for all. If it succeeds in eliminating pain from one limb, there is no guarantee that we wouldn't in future experience pain again in the same limb or some other limb. And 'future' here refers not only to our life here but also to our life hereafter.

Whatever be the official view of the religion we profess, every one of us knows deep down within that life continues in a new body even after death maybe in different subtle worlds or maybe in this same world. Death cannot mean the end of pain, because death itself is not the end, it is only the beginning of another life. The identification with the body and mind is what is responsible for pain (and the suffering associated with it), and so pain continues to shadow us irrespective of whether we are despatched to the hell or the heaven or this earth again in a different body.

So far we have spoken about physical and mental pain which everyone experiences sometime or other. But pain has a higher dimension too. This is a very subtle kind of pain, recorded only in extremely sensitive minds. (By 'sensitive,' in the present context, is not meant emotional or sentimental. The sensitivity here refers to a state of perfect refinement and purity).

Most of us haven't experienced this pain yet because a thick insulating layer of worldly desires covers our minds. When the mind is freed to a large extent from these desires by the practice of discrimination (viveka) and detachment (vairdgya), we begin to 'feel' this subtle pain. No medicine can free us from it, for this pain is in-built into our constitution. It arises out of the acute awareness of our finitude, our vulnerability to external forces, our fear of non-being, and the sense of meaninglessness gnawing at our hearts.

This is the pain we feel when we are awakened to the fact that we are really 'alone' in this universe even when surrounded by doting relatives and genuine friends. This is the pain we experience when we know that we are 'trapped' but have no idea of how to get out of the trap. This is existential pain, and it is related to our very existence as human beings that is to say, as mortal creatures, limited in every respect and threatened at every level by external forces.

To Be Continued

About The Author

Swami Tyagananda

Swami Tyagananda is a monk of the Ramakrishna Order and presently head of the Ramakrishna Vedanta Society in Boston.