If you know that your pain is just momentary, you don’t mind the pain.
You go to doctor and he gives you a prick. You don’t mind the pain. You are doing exercise with dumbbells and it pains. You enjoy that pain.
Why you don’t like suffering is because in suffering you feel, "Oh, this is death!" You associate death with suffering. That is why there is fear. Just simple pain doesn’t give you suffering. You willingly undergo many pains.
By understanding this, layer by layer, going scientifically into it you can observe that you pay more attention to your mind than to the senses, to your intellect more than the mind and to the ego more than your mind.
For example someone saying some words to somebody else doesn’t bother you. But if they said that to you then you get upset. If you go beyond that and see, it is just their opinion. If someone passes a derogatory remark on you, how do you see it beyond the ego? With compassion, “Ok, they are saying something because they are upset.” Then you don’t get hurt. When someone calls the person next to you stupid, you see it as a witness but when he does the same to you, there is a difference.
Do you see the difference? If you can see that also from the same angle, as though they are fighting with somebody else, then you see it beyond ego. Then you say, “He must be tired, stressed out”; instead of taking it as a personal attack on you, you will see the state of mind, intention or consciousness behind the action.
Suffering has a purpose, which is to connect you to your self. Suffering indicates that you got too involved and carried away by all the relative and transient things around you. That is what suffering is all about.
Once you know that suffering is transient your eyes get lifted to something that is eternal. That is when real joy dawns in life.
