Without pain love is not possible. Whose pain? Your pain. If you seek to love – bear pain first. If you seek to love infinitely – bear infinite pain. Because I can say that love is nothing but the other name of pain, it's not two things. To me pain is love, love is pain. It is not that one who loves suffers pain. What is this ‘suffering pain' as it is something coming from somewhere? He who loves suffers pain.

Pain is not something else which is attracted because of your love. It is the price that love extracts from you because love is pain. So you cannot have love without pain, you cannot have pain without love. And if you just go into this whole business of pain and suffering, you'll find at the base there is always love.

Everything that we do, everything that we suffer in our life must be the training to bear it more and more.

“Pain”, CR, January, 1991, p. 21-26

*****************************

Everyone born in the human world has to suffer pain, misery, separation, grief—these are all parts of life, and this is what is not understood, and the lack of this basic understanding is what causes pain! As the concept of day includes within itself night also, and one could not exist without the other, similarly life would not be life without all the pain. And what of the lessons that pain and suffering teach us? Are they not necessary?

Spider's Web, Vol 1, 5th February 1985, Denmark

  *****************************

 My Master used to say that human beings suffer because they are always butting their heads against walls instead of just turning and finding another direction.

Spider's Web, Vol 1, 7th November 1989, West Germany

***************************

Human life cannot exist without problems. Indeed, one definition of life is that it is that which creates problems, which we have then to solve. My Master said that problems were necessary to help us become stronger and stronger, and to grow. Life is nothing but the process of growing from what we are to what we have to become. In other words, it is a process of becoming. Enjoyment and suffering are as light and shadow, and go together, alternating one with the other. They are not part of existence, but something like the scenery we see when we travel. To make either pleasure or pain the object of life is therefore ignorance. We have to grow, to evolve, and this process of evolution is what we have to attend to, and take pleasure and pain as they come, and not look for them.

Spider's Web, Vol 1, 4th March 1987, USA