The root of pain and pleasure is the same.

It is the same sensation with two names. It is like two people receiving a body massage from the same person. One concludes that it was a beautiful rejuvenating process while the other decides that it hurt! The same massage will appear like pain or pleasure depending on the person receiving it.

Life has both of these opposites, pleasure and pain. Both pleasure and pain are from the mind. The mind always moves from one extreme to the other. It rarely falls into the middle path. From pleasure you move to pain, from pain you move to pleasure. As we saw earlier, pleasure and pain are completely dependent on the person feeling the pleasure or pain. Something may seem like pleasure to you, while the same experience may be pain to someone else.

In the Bhagavad Gita, the great scripture that teaches the various paths to Self-realization, the enlightened master Krishna says beautifully, ‘He who regards alike pleasure and pain, and looks on a lump of earth, a stone, and a piece of gold with an equal eye, who is wise and holds praise and blame to be the same, who is unchanged in honor and dishonor, and who treats friend and foe alike, is said to have gone beyond the modes of nature. Pleasure and pain are the same to him and he is ready for enlightenment.’

Buddha, an enlightened master, says, ‘Free yourself from both pleasure and pain.’ Craving for pleasure and nursing pain are both different aspects of the same experience. Both are chains. Pain may look like an ugly chain and pleasure a beautiful chain. Just as the day follows night and night follows day, pain and pleasure will always follow each other.

When you understand that pleasure and pain are both creations of the mind, you will realize that they are both temporary, they come and go like soap bubbles. Nobody is needed to take away your pleasure, because your mind by its very nature will move like a pendulum to the other extreme called pain!

The only way is to go beyond both pleasure and pain. This doesn’t mean suppressing pleasure or forgetting about pain. It is an awareness that transforms pain to bliss which is the energy that exists no matter what the external situation may be. Bliss is your very nature and cannot be lost. Just because of your resistance to what is happening, you feel pain and your natural bliss is forgotten.

Like darkness, pain, whether it is physical, mental, or emotional, has only a negative existence . Darkness exists only in the absence of light. As such, it has no positive existence of its own. In the same way, pain exists only in the absence of awareness. Just as darkness disappears automatically when light is brought into a room, pain dissolves automatically when the energy of your awareness is focused on it.

Any mental or emotional pain that you carry is just the tip of the iceberg. You need to go into the root where it starts. You need to work on the root cause for it and heal it. Otherwise, there is a distinct danger that you will inflict that pain on someone else or hurt yourself more with it. I always tell people,

‘If you have pain, just drop everything and work on it. See that its root is healed. Only then you can be in a safe zone. Otherwise neither you nor the people living around you are in a safe zone.’

When you face any pain with awareness you become aware that you are not just the body. You become aware that no pain can touch the real ‘you’. Once you realize that you are beyond pain, you rise above pain to become a dukkhateeta. You experience the rare freedom that arises with non-attachment to the body. You will carry this freedom all your life. You leave the mundane life behind and enter into a spiritual plane. The whole material world disappears and another world arises, one of incomparable beauty, innocence, joy and compassion.

The pain will evaporate of its own accord when you see the nature and cause of pain with intense inner clarity because the clarity evaporates the reasons for the pain to exist in you. This realization brings with it a state of absolute bliss, which is the state of enlightenment.

source: Living Enlightenment