I have glimpses of how psychological, existential pain is created by the ego. It is homemade, and it can be homemade. But what about physical pain: why is it there? Is it a necessary part of dying? I do not feel I am afraid of death as much as I am afraid of physical pain, senility, old age.
Psychological pain can be dissolved; and only psychological pain can be dissolved. The other pain, the physical pain, is part of life and death; there is no way to dissolve it. But it never creates a problem. Have you ever observed? — The problem is only when you are thinking about it. If you think of old age, you become afraid, but old people are not trembling. If you think of illness, you become afraid, but when the illness has already happened, there is no fear, there is no problem. One accepts it as a fact.
The real problem is always psychological. The physical pain is part of life. When you start thinking about it, it is not physical pain at all; it has become psychological. You think about death; there is fear. But when death actually happens there is no fear. Fear is always about something in the future. Fear never exists in the present moment. If you are going to the front in a war, you will be afraid, you will be very apprehensive. You will tremble; you will not be able to sleep: many nightmares will haunt you. But once you are on the front — ask the soldiers — once you are on the front, you forget all about it. Bullets may be passing and you can enjoy your lunch; and bombs may be falling and you can play cards.
You can ask Gurudayal. He has been in the war, he has been to the front, he has been a soldier; he knows: the fear is about the future. Then the problem is not physical — because the fear exists in your psychology. When the pain is actual, physical, there is no problem about it. Reality never comes as a problem; it is only the ideas about reality that create the problem.
So the first thing to be understood is: if you can dissolve the psychological pain, no problem is left. Then you start living in the moment. “Psychological” means: of the past, of the future, never of the present. Mind never exists in the present. In the present reality exists, not the mind. Mind exists in the past and the future, and in past and future reality does not exist. In fact, mind and reality never come across each other. They have never seen each other’s face. Reality remains unknown to mind, and mind remains unknown to reality.
The psychology is the problem; the reality never is a problem.
There is an old fable . . . Darkness approached God and said, “Enough is enough! Your sun goes on haunting me, chasing me. I can never rest; wherever I go to rest he is there, and I have to run away again. And I have not done any wrong to him. This is unjust. And I have come to you to get justice.” It was perfectly right; the complaint was true. And God called the sun and asked the sun, “Why do you go on chasing this poor woman, darkness? What has she done to you?” The sun said, “I don’t know her at all. I have never seen her. You just call her in front of me; only then can I say something. I don’t remember ever having done any wrong to her, because I don’t know her. We are not familiar. Nobody has ever introduced us to each other; we are not even acquainted. It is for the first time from you that I am hearing about this woman, this darkness. You call her!”
The case remains pending — because God could not call darkness before the sun. They cannot exist together, they cannot encounter each other. When darkness is, the sun cannot be; when the sun is, the darkness cannot be. Exactly the same is the relationship between mind and reality: the psychology is the problem, the reality never is a problem. You just dissolve your psychological problems — and they are dissolved by dissolving the center of them all: the ego. Once you don’t think yourself separate from existence, problems simply evaporate, as dewdrops disappear in the morning when the sun rises, not even leaving a trace behind. They simply disappear.
Physical pain will remain, but again I will insist that it has never been a problem to anybody. If your leg is broken, it is broken. It is not a problem. The problem is only in imagination: “If my leg is broken, then what am I going to do? And how am I to avoid, or how am I to behave and work my way so my leg is never broken?”
Now, if you become afraid about such things you cannot live, because your legs can be broken, your neck can be broken, your eyes can go blind. Anything is possible; millions of things are possible. If you become obsessed with all these problems which are possible . . .
I am not saying they are not possible. They are all possible. Whatsoever has happened to any human being, ever, can happen to you. Cancer can happen, TB can happen, death can happen; everything is possible. Man is vulnerable. You can just go outside on the road and you can be hit by a car. I am not saying don’t go outside on the road. You can sit in a room and the roof can fall. There is no way to save yourself totally and perfectly. You can be lying down on your bed, but do you know that ninety-seven percent of people die on a bed? That is the most dangerous place! Avoid it as much as you can; never go to bed. Ninety-seven percent of people die in bed. Even travelling by airplane is not so dangerous; it is more dangerous to be in bed. And remember, more people die in the night . . . so, remain trembling. Then it is up to you. Then you will not be able to live at all.
Psychological problems are the only problems. You can become paranoid, you can become split, you can become paralyzed because of fear — but this is nothing to do with reality. You see a blind man walking on the road perfectly well; blindness in itself is not the problem. You can see beggars — their legs broken, their hands gone, and still laughing, still gossiping with each other, still talking about women, making remarks, singing a tune.
Just watch life: life is never a problem. Man has tremendous capacity to adjust to the fact, but man has no capacity to adjust to the future. Once you try to protect yourself and secure yourself in the future, then you will be in a turmoil, in a chaos. You will start falling apart. And then there are millions of problems — problems and problems and problems. You cannot even commit suicide, because the poison may not be the right poison. In India you cannot rely on anything! They may have mixed something into it; it may not be poison at all. You may take it and you will lie down . . . and you will wait and wait and wait — and death is not coming. Then everything creates a problem.
Mulla Nasrudin was going to commit suicide. He came across an astrologer on the street, and the astrologer said, “Mulla, wait. Let me see your hand.” He said, “What do I have to do now with astrology? I am going to commit suicide! So there is no point; now there is no future.” The astrologer said, “Wait. Let me see whether you can succeed or not.” Future remains. You may not succeed, you may be caught by the police, you may misfire. There is no way to be certain about the future — not even about death, not even about suicide. What to say about life? Life is such a complex phenomenon; how can you be certain? Everything is possible and nothing is certain.
If you become afraid, this is just your psychology. Something has to be done to your mind. And if you understand me rightly, meditation is nothing but an effort to look at reality without the mind — because that is the only way to look at reality. If the mind is there it distorts, it corrupts. Drop the mind and see reality — direct, immediate, face to face. And there is no problem. Reality has never created any problem for anybody. I am here; you are also here — I don’t see a single problem. If I fall ill, I fall ill. What is there to be worried about? Why make a fuss about it? If I die, I die.
A problem needs space: in the present moment there is no space. Things only happen; there is no time to think about it. You can think about the past because there is distance; you can think about the future, there is distance. In fact, future and past are created just to give us space so that we can worry. And the more space you have, the more worry. Now in India they are much more worried because they think, “Next life . . . and . . . and” — ad infinitum — “what is going to happen in the next life?” A person is doing something and he does not think only about the consequences that are going to happen here now; he thinks, “What karma am I going to gather for my future life?” Now he will become even more worried; he has more space. And how is he going to fill that space? — he will fill it with more and more problems. Worry is a way to fill the empty space of the future.
The questioner says, “I have glimpses of how psychological, existential pain is created by ego. It is homemade, and it can be unmade.”
Just understanding it intellectually won’t help; you have to do it. Do it, and then the next question will disappear. Do it, and then you will find there is not any problem left. “But what about physical pain?” Now this is how problems arise. Intellectually you have understood one thing, but that doesn’t make any sense. The next question immediately brings your reality to the surface: you have not understood. It is as if a blind man goes on groping with his stick; he finds his path by it. And then we say, “Your eyes can be cured, but then you will have to drop your walking stick. It is not needed.” The blind man will say, “I can understand that my eyes can be cured, but how can I walk without my stick?” Now, intellectually he has understood that eyes can be cured, but existentially, experientially, he has not understood it — otherwise the next question wouldn’t arise.
Sometimes people come to me and they ask one question, and I say, “You go on; you ask the next too.” Because one question may not show the reality; they may be just showing their intellectual understanding. But with the next question they are bound to be caught. They are bound to be, because with the next question, immediately they will miss. The first part of the question is perfect, but you have got the point only through the mind. It is not yet chewed well; it is not yet digested. It has not become blood, bones, marrow. It is not yet part of your existence. Otherwise, you can never ask, “What about the physical pain?” — because the very question is psychological. Physical pain is not a problem — when it is there, it is there; when it is not there, it is not there.
A problem arises when something is not there and you want it to be there, or when something is there and you don’t want it to be there. A problem is always psychological: “Why is it there?” Now this is all psychological. Who is to say why it is there? There is nobody to answer. Only explanations can be given, but those are not really answers. Explanations are simple. It is very simple: pain is there because pleasure is there. Pleasure cannot exist without pain.
If you want a life absolutely painless, then you will have to live a life absolutely pleasureless. They come together in one package. They are not two things really; they are one thing — not different, not separate, and cannot be separated.
That’s what man has been doing through the centuries: separating, to somehow have all the pleasures of the world and not have any pain; but this is not possible. The more pleasures you have, the more pain also. The bigger the peak, the deeper will be the valley by the side. You want no valleys and you want big peaks. Then the peaks cannot exist; they can exist only with valleys. The valley is nothing but a situation in which a peak becomes possible. The peak and the valley are joined together. You want pleasure and you don’t want pain.
For example: you love a woman or you love a man, and when the woman is with you, you are happy. Now, you would like to be happy whenever she is with you, but when she goes away you don’t want the pain. If you are really happy with a woman when she is with you, how can you avoid the pain of separation when she is gone and she is no longer there? You will miss her; you will feel the absence. The absence is bound to become pain. If you really want that you should not have any pain, then you should start avoiding all pleasure. Then when the woman is there don’t feel happy; just remain sad, just remain unhappy — so that when she goes, there is no problem.
If somebody greets you and you feel happy, then when somebody insults you, you will feel unhappy. This trick has been tried. This has been one of the most basic tricks that all of the so-called religious people have tried: if you want to avoid pain, avoid pleasure. But then what is the point? If you want to avoid death, avoid life — but then what is the point of it all? You will be dead. Before death, you will be dead.
If you want to be perfectly secure, enter into your grave and lie down there. You will be perfectly secure. Don’t breathe, because if you breathe there is danger . . . because there are all sorts of infections . . . There is danger, so don’t breathe, don’t move . . . just don’t live. Commit suicide; then there will be no pain. But then why are you searching for it? You want no pain and all pleasure. You demand something impossible: you want that two plus two should not be four. You want them to become five, or three, or anything, but never four. But they are four.
Whatever you do, howsoever you deceive yourself and others, they will remain four. Pain and pleasure go together like night and day, like birth and death, like love and hate.
-Osho
From The Discipline of Transcendence, V.4, Discourse #2, Q1
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