Osho – From Medication to Meditation
Pain - Đau đớn (Read in Vietnamese)
Can you please talk about pain and our identification with it?
Prhe witnessing self is never felt. We always feel some identity; we always feel some identification. And the witnessing consciousness is the reality. So why does this happen? And how does this happen?
You are in pain — what is really happening inside? Analyze the whole phenomenon: the pain is there, and there is this consciousness that pain is there. These are the two points: the pain is there, and there is this consciousness that the pain is there. But there is no gap, and somehow, "I am in pain" — this feeling happens — "I am in pain." And not only this — sooner or later, "I am the pain" begins, happens, starts to be the feeling.
"I am pain; I am in pain; I am aware of the pain" — these are three different, very different states. The rishi says, "I am aware of the pain." This much can be allowed, because then you transcend pain. The awareness transcends — you are different from the pain, and there is a deep separation. Really, there has never been any relation; the relation begins to appear only because of the nearness, because of the intimate nearness of your consciousness and all that happens around.
Consciousness is so near when you are in pain — it is just there by the side, very near. It has to be; otherwise, the pain cannot be cured. It has to be just near to feel it, to know it, to be aware about it. But because of this nearness, you become identified, and one. This is a safety measure again; this is a security measure, a natural security. When there is pain you must be near; when there is pain your consciousness must go in a rush towards the pain — to feel it, to do something about it.
You are on the street and suddenly you feel a snake there — then your whole consciousness just becomes a jump. No moment can be lost, not even in thinking what to do. There is no gap between being aware and the action. You must be very near; only then this can happen. When your body is suffering pain, disease, illness, you must be near; otherwise, life cannot survive. If you are far off and the pain is not felt, then you will die. The pain must be felt immediately — there should be no gap. The message must be received immediately, and your consciousness must go to the spot to do something. That's why nearness is a necessity. But because of this necessity, the other phenomenon happens: so near, you become one; so near, you begin to feel, "This is me — this pain, this pleasure." Because of nearness there is identification: you become anger, you become love, you become pain, you become happiness.
The rishi says that there are two ways to disassociate yourself from these false identities. You are not what you have been thinking, feeling, imagining, projecting; what you are is simply the fact of being aware. Whatsoever happens, you remain just the awareness. You are awareness — that identity cannot be broken, that identity cannot be negated. All else can be negated and thrown; awareness remains the ultimate substratum, the ultimate base. You cannot deny it, you cannot negate it, you cannot disassociate yourself from it.
So this is the process: That which cannot be thrown, that which cannot be made separate from you, is you; that which can be separated, you are not. The pain is there; a moment later it may not be there — but you will be. Happiness has come, and it will go; it has been, and it will not be — but you will be. The body is young, then the body becomes old. All else comes and goes — guests come and go — but the host remains the same. So the Zen mystics say: Do not be lost in the crowd of the guests. Remember your host-ness. That host-ness is awareness. That host-ness is the witnessing consciousness. What is the basic element that remains always the same in you? Only be that, and disidentify yourself from all that comes and goes. But we become identified with the guest. Really the host is so occupied with the guest, he forgets.
Mulla Nasruddin has given a party for some friends and some strangers. The party is very boring, and half the night is just lost and it goes on. So one stranger, not knowing that Mulla is the host, says to him, "I have never seen such a party, such nonsense. It seems never-ending, and I am so bored that I would like to leave."
Mulla says, "You have said what I was going to say to you. I myself have never seen such a boring and nonsense party before, but I was not so courageous as you are. I was also thinking to leave it and just run away." So they both run. Then, in the street Mulla remembers and says, "Something has gone wrong, because now I remember: I am the host! So please excuse me, I have to go back."
This is happening to us all. The host is lost, the host is forgotten every moment. The host is your witnessing self. Pain comes and pleasure follows; there is happiness, and there is misery. And each moment, whatsoever comes you are identified with it, you become the guest. Remember the host. When the guest is there, remember the host. And there are so many types of guests: pleasurable, painful; guests you would like, guests you would not like to be your guests; guests you would like to live with, guests you would like to avoid — but all guests. Remember the host. Constantly remember the host. Be centred in the host. Remain in your host-ness; then there is a separation. Then there is a gap, an interval — the bridge is broken. The moment this bridge is broken, the phenomenon of renunciation happens. Then you are in it, and not of it. Then you are there in the guest, and still a host. You need not escape from the guest — there is no need.
How can I deal with physical pain as well as the pain I feel in spiritual growth? Growth is painful because you have been avoiding a thousand and one pains in your life. By avoiding you cannot destroy them — they go on accumulating. You go on swallowing your pains; they remain in your system. That's why growth is painful — when you start growing, when you decide to grow, you have to face all the pains that you have repressed. You cannot just bypass them.
You have been brought up in a wrong way. Unfortunately, until now, not a single society has existed on the earth which has not been repressive of pain. All societies depend on repression. Two things they repress: one is pain, another is pleasure. And they repress pleasure also because of pain. Their reasoning is that if you are not too happy you will never become too unhappy; if joy is destroyed you will never be deep in pain. To avoid pain they avoid pleasure. To avoid death they avoid life.
And the logic has something in it. Both grow together — if you want to have a life of ecstasy you will have to accept many agonies. If you want the peaks of the Himalayas then you will also have the valleys. But nothing is wrong with the valleys; your approach just has to be different. You can enjoy both — the peak is beautiful, so is the valley. And there are moments when one should enjoy the peak and there are moments when one should relax in the valley.
The peak is sunlit, it is in a dialogue with the sky. The valley is dark, but whenever you want to relax you have to move into the darkness of the valley. If you want to have peaks you will need to grow roots into the valley — the deeper your roots go, the higher your tree will grow. The tree cannot grow without roots and the roots have to move deep into the soil.
Pain and pleasure are intrinsic parts of life. People are so much afraid of pain that they repress pain, they avoid any situation that brings pain, they go on dodging pain. And finally they stumble upon the fact that if you really want to avoid pain you will have to avoid pleasure. That's why your monks avoid pleasure — they are afraid of pleasure. In fact they are simply avoiding all possibilities of pain. They know that if you avoid pleasure then naturally great pain is not possible; it comes only as a shadow of pleasure. Then you walk on the plain ground — you never move on the peaks and you never fall into the valleys. But then you are living dead, then you are not alive.
Life exists between this polarity. This tension between pain and pleasure makes you capable of creating great music; music exists only in this tension. Destroy the polarity and you will be dull, you will be stale, you will be dusty — you won't have any meaning and you will never know what splendour is. You will have missed life.
The man who wants to know life and live life has to accept and embrace death. They come together, they are two aspects of a single phenomenon. That's why growth is painful. You have to go into all those pains that you have been avoiding. It hurts. You have to go through all those wounds that somehow you have managed not to look at. But the deeper you go into pain, the deeper is your capacity to go into pleasure. If you can go into pain to the uttermost limit, you will be able to touch heaven.
I have heard: A man came to a Zen master and asked, "How shall we avoid heat and cold?" Metaphorically, he is asking, "How should we avoid pleasure and pain?" That is the Zen way of talking about pleasure and pain: heat and cold. "How shall we avoid heat and cold?" The master answered, "Be hot, be cold."
To be free of pain the pain has to be accepted, inevitably and naturally. Pain is pain — a simple painful fact — but suffering is only and always the refusal of pain, the claim that life should not be painful. It is the rejection of a fact, the denial of life and of the nature of things. Death is the mind and mind's dying. Where there is no fear of death, who is there to die?
Man is unique among creatures in his knowledge of death and in his laughter. Wonderfully then, he can even make of death a new thing: he can die laughing. It is only man who knows laughter; no other animal laughs. It is only man who knows death; no other animal knows death — animals simply die, they are not conscious of the phenomenon of death.
Man is aware of two things which no animal is: one is laughter, another is death. Then a new synthesis is possible. It is only man who can die laughing — he can join the consciousness of death and the capacity to laugh. And if you can die laughing, only then will you give a valid proof that you must have lived laughing. Death is the final statement of your whole life — the conclusion, the concluding remark. How you have lived will be shown by your death, how you die. Can you die laughing? Then you were a grown-up person. If you die crying, weeping, clinging, then you were a child. You were not grown-up, you were immature. If you die crying, weeping, clinging to life, that simply shows you have been avoiding death and you have been avoiding all pains, all kinds of pains.
Growth is facing the reality, encountering the fact, whatsoever it is. And let me repeat: Pain is simply pain; there is no suffering in it. Suffering comes from your desire that the pain should not be there, that there is something wrong in pain. Watch, witness, and you will be surprised. You have a headache: the pain is there but suffering is not there. Suffering is a secondary phenomenon, pain is primary. The headache is there, the pain is there; it is simply a fact. There is no judgment about it. You don't call it good or bad, you don't give it any value; it is just a fact. The rose is a fact, so is the thorn. The day is a fact, so is the night. The head is a fact, so is the headache. You simply take note of it.
Buddha taught his disciples that when you have a headache simply say twice "Headache, headache." Take note. But don't evaluate, don't say "Why? Why has this headache happened to me? It should not happen to me." The moment you say, "It should not," you bring suffering in. Now suffering is created by you, not by the headache. Suffering is your antagonistic interpretation, suffering is your denial of the fact.
And the moment you say, "It should not be," you have started avoiding it, you have started turning yourself away from it. You would like to be occupied in something so that you can forget it. You turn the radio or the telly on or you go to the club or you start reading or you go and start working in the garden — you divert yourself, you distract yourself. Now that pain has not been witnessed; you have simply distracted yourself. That pain will be absorbed by the system.
Let this key be very deeply understood. If you can witness your headache without taking any antagonistic attitude, without avoiding it, without escaping from it; if you can just be there, meditatively there — "Headache, headache" — if you can just simply see it, the headache will go in its time. 1 am not saying that it will go miraculously, that just by your seeing it will go. It will go in its time. But it will not be absorbed by your system, it will not poison your system. It will be there, you will take note of it, and it will be gone. It will be released.
When you witness a certain thing in yourself it cannot enter into your system. It always enters when you avoid it, when you escape from it. When you become absent then it enters into your system. Only when you are absent can pain become part of your being — if you are present your very presence prevents it from becoming part of your being.
And if you can go on seeing your pains you will not be accumulating them. You have not been taught the right clue, so you go on avoiding. Then you accumulate so much pain, you are afraid to face it, you are afraid to accept it. Growth becomes painful — it is because of wrong conditioning. Otherwise growth is not painful, growth is utterly pleasant.
When the tree grows and becomes bigger do you think there is pain? There is no pain. Even when a child is born, if the mother accepts it there will be no pain. But the mother rejects it; the mother is afraid. She becomes tense, she tries to hold the child inside — which is not possible. The child is ready to go out into the world, the child is ready to leave the mother. He is ripe, the womb cannot contain him any more. if the womb contains him any more the mother will die and the child will die. But the mother is afraid.
She has heard that it is very painful to give birth to a child — birth pangs, birth pain. She is afraid, and out of fear she becomes tense and closed. Otherwise — in primitive societies those tribes still exist — childbirth is so simple, with no pain at all. On the contrary, you will be surprised, the greatest ecstasy happens to the woman in childbirth — not pain, not agony at all, but the greatest ecstasy. No sexual orgasm is so satisfying and, so tremendous as the orgasm that happens to the woman when she gives birth to the child naturally. The whole sexual mechanism of the woman pulsates as it cannot pulsate in any lovemaking. The child is coming from the deepest core of the woman. No man can ever penetrate a woman to that core. And the pulsation arises from the inside. The pulsation is a must — that pulsation will come like waves, great tidal waves of joy. Only that will help the child to come out, only that will help the passage to open for the child. So there will be great pulsation and the whole sexual being of the woman will have tremendous joy.
But what actually has happened to humanity is just the opposite: the woman comes to feel the greatest agony of her life. And this is a mind creation, this is wrong upbringing. The birth can be natural if you accept it. And so it is with your birth. Growth means you are being born every day. Birth does not end the day you were born — on that day it simply starts, it is only a beginning. The day you left the womb of your mother you were not born, you started being born; that was just the beginning. And a man goes on being born till he dies. It is not that you are born in a single moment. Your birth process continues for seventy, eighty, ninety years, however long you live.
It is a continuum. And every day you will feel joy — growing new leaves, new foliage, new flowers, new branches, rising higher and higher and touching new altitudes. You will be getting deeper, higher, you will be reaching to peaks. Growth will not be painful. But growth is painful — it is because of you, your wrong conditioning. You have been taught not to grow; you have been taught to remain static, you have been taught to cling to the familiar and the known. That's why each time the known disappears from your hands you start crying. A toy has been broken, a pacifier has been taken away...
Remember, only one thing is going to help you: awareness — nothing else. Growth will remain painful if you don't accept life in all its ups and downs. The summer has to be accepted and the winter too. This is what I call meditation. Meditation is when you are emptied of all that is old and told and done to death. Then you see. Or rather, then there is seeing: the birth of the new. I have had a hard, horrible illness from my early age and this mistake of nature makes me suffer constantly. Could you please talk about suffering?
he suffering is your interpretation. You have become too much identified with it. That is your decision. You can disidentify, and the suffering disappears. Your suffering is like a nightmare: in the dream you think a great rock has fallen on your chest, it is crushing you to death. Out of fear you awake... and all that you find is nothing — your own hands resting on your chest. But the weight of your hands triggered imagination in you: it became a rock, and you started feeling very, very frightened. And because of the fear, you are awakened... and now you laugh. Ask the buddhas, ask the awakened ones, and they say there is no suffering in the world —people are fast asleep and dreaming all kinds of sufferings.
And I know your difficulty: if you have a physical problem, if you are blind, how can you believe that this is only a dream? If you are crippled, how can you believe that this is only a dream? But have you not watched? — every night you dream, and every morning you know that it was a dream and all nonsense — and again you will dream, and in dream again you will believe that this is truth. How many dreams have you dreamed in your life? Millions of dreams! Each night you are dreaming almost without break; just for a few minutes the dreaming stops, and then again another cycle of dreaming starts.
Millions of dreams you have dreamed. And every morning you have laughed and you have said it was unreal, but you have not learnt much. Tonight again when you dream, the same fallacy will persist: you will know that this is truth — in dream you will know this is true. The day you can remember in your dream that this is a dream, immediately the dream disappears... because you have brought awareness into your life.
It looks very difficult to trust that all that you are suffering is just a dream created by yourself — but it is so, because all those who have become awakened say so. Not a single awakened person has said otherwise. And in lucid moments of awareness you will also feel the same. This is my suggestion for you: your problem cannot be solved only by an intellectual discussion — your problem can be only dissolved, not solved.
Your problem can only be dissolved by becoming more aware. One of my friends, an old friend, fell from a staircase and broke both his legs. I went to see him; he was in tremendous pain. And he was a very active person although he was very old, seventy-five — but very active, almost young, and running so much after this and that, and doing this and that, that it was impossible for him to rest on the bed. And the doctors had said that for three months at least he had to be only in bed. This was more of a calamity than the two broken legs.
When I saw him, he started crying. I had never seen that man cry — he is a strong man, a very strong man, almost a man of steel, and has seen all kinds of things in his life, is a very seasoned man. I asked him, "You, and crying — what is the matter with you?"
He said, "Just bless me so that I can die. I don't want to live anymore — three months just in bed! Can you imagine? This is torture. Just three days have passed and it feels almost as if for three years I have been in bed. You know me," he said, "I cannot rest. Just bless me so that I can die soon! I don't want to live anymore. These three months and then the doctors say I will remain crippled my whole life — so what is the point?"
I said to him, "You please do a meditation. I will sit by your side, you just do a simple meditation: that you are not the body."
He was dubious. He said, "What is that going to do to me? I have heard all that you say about meditation, but I cannot meditate because I cannot sit silently."
I said, "Now there is no question of sitting silently — you are already in the bed.
This is a blessing! Just close your eyes and I will teach you a meditation. And I bless you to die, because if you want to die then perfectly good. But my blessing may work, may not work, so meanwhile you meditate."
He understood the point: "There is nothing to do ...so why not meditate?" A simple meditation I told him: "You simply go in, look at the body from the inside, say 'It is not me — the body is far away, far away, going distant and more distant and more distant. I am a watcher on the hills, and the body is down there in the dark valley, and the distance is immense.'"
Half an hour passed. I had to leave, and he was in such a meditation that I didn't want to disturb him, but I didn't want to leave him either because I wanted to know what was happening, what he would say. So I had to shake him. He said, "Don't disturb me!"
I said, "But I have to leave."
He said, "You can leave, but don't disturb me — it is so beautiful. The body is really lying so far away, miles and miles away; I have left it in the valley and I am sitting on the top of the hill, a sunlit hill. It is so beautiful, and I don't feel any pain either." And those three months proved the most valuable time of his life. Those three months made him a totally different man. He is still crippled, cannot walk, has to remain mostly in the bed — but you cannot find a more blissful person. He radiates bliss. Now he says it was not a curse — it was a blessing.
Suffering can be transformed into a blessing. Who knows? — you are transforming your blessings into sufferings.
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