“Ouch, my arm hurts” you might say.  But you’d be wrong.  It’s not your arm that hurts; it’s your brain.  “Whoa, them’s fightin’ words.  It’s my arm.  I oughta know.” you retort.  Sorry, wrong again.  You’ve been duped – duped by a 5000 year-old misunderstanding of the origin and practice of pain.

It’s amazing the lies we’re taught and then live by for all our lives here on Planet Earth.

In a recent and most enlightening article in Sports Illustrated entitled The Truth About Pain: It’s In Your Head by David Epstein the old theories of pain’s beginnings in the injury itself and then traveling through the body’s nerve to the brain are trashed and re-theorized by modern medical science.

Relating to athletes in pain, a number of fascinating stories are told of athletes overcoming pain to complete their events, and these studies show conclusively, one after the other, that pain originates, not in the broken bone or the pulled muscle itself, but rather in the brain and not the injury.

Neuroscientists and psychologists now state that, “…the brain is not a passive recipient of pain information but rather an active gatherer of relevant data from the skin and organs that has ultimate say in dispensing pain as it sees it.  If the nerve fibers compose a web in the body, the brain is the spider at the center, using the web as a data-collecting extension of its body.  Each vibration of the web reveals the location and site of the intruding sensation and sets other strands vibrating that the spider must collectively interpret to decide on a course of action.”

It goes on to explain that it is the brain that makes up the pain to alert other parts of the brain that there is a problem in the body, and that the pain actually originates in the brain itself.   Then it goes on to explain that pain killers actually do nothing to the injury itself, but rather simply fool the brain so that it does not make up the concept of pain in the first place.

It also gives some classic examples of people who have lost limbs and yet still feel the pain in their missing toes or feet or limbs.

The article is long, well documented and very compelling to one who studies the illusion of matter and thinks daily on the unreality of the human body trying to overcome and re-examine the lies we’ve been taught in this earthly experience.

It made me recollect my own enlightening experience with pain.

I sat in the dentist chair awaiting the onslaught to both body and senses.  My friend, the dentist, asked, “Would you like some gas?”  The oncoming assault was, this time, more than just a simple drilling and plaster job, but something far more intrusive – the pulling of a tooth.  Yuck!  Yikes!!

I agreed to the gas – whatever it took to help me vacate the premises while the invasion took place.

The gear was strapped on and the gentle hissing began.  I closed my eyes and began to breathe in the strange mixture of oxygen and foreign stuff.

I found myself scrambling up a steeply inclined road inside my head and I sat perched in the middle of this road and looked down, eyes still shut, at the proceedings.  Part of me was aware of the dentist instructing the nurse, calling for the ‘yanker’ – probably not the term he used – and fitting it around my damaged tooth.  I heard his grunt as he pulled.  I heard the crackle of bone and tooth as he broke it loose.  I heard him mutter his favorite curse word as the ‘yanker’ slipped from the tooth and then I once again experienced his second try at extraction.

I remember that the corridor that I peered down into was solely red of color – dark and tunnel-like – perhaps what it might be like looking down into my throat.  I sat perched and fascinated, elbows on knees, chin on hands, quietly wondering what would happen next.

And then I saw it.

At the end of the red corridor, there slid across the space before me 4 letters, slowly, somewhat like a ticker tape news flash you might see on a building in Times Square.  The four letters spelled out “P—A—I—N”.  The letters hovered there in space for a moment and then passed through the tunnel on by through the side wall.  Then they were gone.  I heard the dentist say, ”Got it!”  I then said to myself with a chuckle, “Oh, that must have been pain.”

I never felt any pain.  I never had an ouch or a jolt or a stab.  I only read it on the wall of my mind.  My brain, so confused in its drug induced state, warned me of pain by sending me a letter – or letters.  It had to do something.  The normal function of communication was out of order.  The phone lines had been cut, so it sent out an email a decade before the Internet had been invented.

When I came to, (Came to what?  Came to another reality or unreality?) I laughed through my mouth of cotton and numbness and muttered my story to the dentist.  He looked at me knowingly, smiling knowingly, probably considering me still a bit loony.  But I was not loony.  Rather I was smarter for the experience.

I had seen through the lie of matter into the truth about pain.  It was clearly something my brain had made up and presented to me in an alternate form.  I felt no pain.  I saw, in a silly way, that I was supposed to be having it and I suppose I entertained it, or rather it entertained me.

Nonetheless it was not anything to fear, to sweat, to anticipate.  It was a strange joke on my mind perpetuated by a confused brain sending the wrong signals.

Pain is rarely a big issue in my life.  Oh yes, sometimes I succumb to the illusion and fall to its supposed power, but I do believe that my growing understanding of the truth of pain is my protection against it.

Let’s hear it for medical science – correcting a wrong that they have perpetuated for centuries.  Now all the rest of us have to do is change around a lifetime of thinking and mis-education on the subject and come to a new understanding.  It’s probably going to mean a lot of time spent actively watching our thought, correcting misconceptions, abolishing the lies and essentially knowing the truth.  It’s probably going to take some real consecrated effort, but wouldn’t it be worth it if we could abolish pain in this mortal experience?

I suggest we all get busy.