A weak and unconscious person wants revenge in response to emotional, mental, or physical pain, while a strong and conscious person is able to learn and forgive in response to pain. This is the main difference – do we own the pain and learn from what we are experiencing, knowing that we have created it, or do we blame someone and project our pain outside onto something/someone else, seeing that/them as the cause? 

If we own the pain, we build the Self and increase our consciousness. If we project the pain, we only program the lesson to repeat – until we get it.

“Owning the pain” means taking responsibility for your own reaction of pain to the external or internal stimuli. We might not have a choice in receiving some of the stimuli from life, but we always have a choice in the perception of that stimuli – i.e. it is up to us how we see what has occurred. And if we have ended up experiencing pain, this means that we chose to react to the stimuli in the emotional, mental, physical or existential pain.

Another issue with painful life stimuli is our judgment of it. A weak and unconscious person sees emotional and mental pain in a similar manner to the physical response of an animal – i.e. “pain is bad/wrong” – but since he/she is a person, not an animal, there is also the personality involvement, which attempts to place that pain in the cause and effect cycle – i.e. it becomes “pain is bad/wrong and either I caused it to myself, or someone else caused it to me”. Either way one is already on the lookout for “who is at fault for the pain” because of the initial assumption that the pain was “wrong”. 

Some people tend to automatically project the responsibility for the pain to everyone else but themselves. Others, who generally are in the in between stage of not-quite-unconscious and not-completely-conscious either – these individuals tend to see themselves at fault for their own experience of pain. 

A conscious person would take responsibility for their own experience but will not blame themselves for it! 

The difference here is in the initial assumption that the “pain is wrong”. Why is it “wrong”? It is uncomfortable for sure, it is generally undesired. But wrong?…

Pain is not “wrong” (not that it is “right” either!) – it is an experience of friction. A conscious being can still experience the friction of duality, but it will not be labeled as “pain”. A better label might be “discomfort”. 

And discomfort is an essential component of growth and learning. No one can move into anything new if they are not ever willing to be uncomfortable! Thus, no learning, no Self/Soul building can occur is we are not willing to be uncomfortable!

If we know that pain is not wrong but a type of label on our experience of friction (from being in duality), then 3 things occur:

• we do not project the responsibility for that pain outside of ourselves;
• we do not go into self-blame, looking for the fault in our own behavior;
• we can change the label of that pain to “discomfort”, thus dis-arming it and learning from it.