Preksha Dhyana Contemplation and Auto Suggestion

Author(s): Mahapragna Acharya
Publisher: Jain Vishva Bharati

Page 31

Benefits
Freedom from Suffering
Our body passes through various vicissitudes of time and life. Everyone is sometimes happy and at other times miserable; at times healthy, and sometimes sick; sometimes young and sometimes old. Howerver, there are three chief misseries : sickness, old age and death.
Whenenver one is sick, one suffers the misery of sickness. Normally a state of disease is a painful one for everybody.
Some scientists are engaged in research to eliminate suffering during sickness. Pain-killer drugs are administerd to alleviate pain during sickness. Some derivatives of opium, like morphine, are commonly used as pain-killers and every year, sale- value of such pain-killers amounts to millions of rupees. People buy them for headache, stomach-ache, pain in joints and knees, and continue to consume such drugs hoping to allevitate their suffering.
A varieties of therapies and remedies have been developed for curing the illness and/or getting rid of the suffering. Psychological research claims that in the next ten or twenty years we shall discover a mental exercise and give such training to the sick that it would be possible to live with the illness without suffering even without drugs. It has been well established recently that chemical substances having the same effect as poweful pain-killers, such as morphine, are secreted by certain parts of the brain. One of them is called endorphine (meaning the internal 1. Two regions in the brain known to be involved in pain regulation are: the medial
thalam us and the periaqueductal grey matter (PAG)
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