“At first sight it may seem that the pain-body is the greatest obstacle to the arising of a new consciousness in humanity. It occupies your mind, controls and distorts your thinking, disrupts your relationships, and feels like a dark cloud that occupies your entire energy field. It tends to make you unconscious, spiritually speaking, which means totally identified with mind and emotion. It makes you reactive, makes, you say and do things that are designed to increase the unhappiness within yourself and the world.

As unhappiness increases, however, it also causes increases disruption in your life. Perhaps the body can’t take the stress anymore and develops an illness or some dysfunction. Perhaps you become involved in an accident, some huge conflict situation or drama that was caused by the pain body’s desire for something bad to happen, or you become the perpetrator of physical violence. Or it all becomes too much and you cannot live with your unhappy self anymore. The pain-body, of course, is part of the false self.”