I was thinking about what is harder to handle: mental pain or physical pain. According to me both are painful but mental pain is easier to handle than physical pain by training your mind to focus on krsna and not be bothered by others insulting you. A lot of mental pain is related to the anxiety of suffering physical pain in the future( for eg being poor without food and shelter) or the physical torture which happened before( for eg in rape or child abuse). Realizing yourself not to be the mind and detaching yourself from insults of others you can somehow manage. But what to do when you are pierced by 30 arrows going through your body like Bhismadeva( all glories to bhismadeva I don't know how he tolearted all this) or if you are being burnt in fire, or being stabbed by a knife or being eaten by a wild beast. Why doesn't theoretical knowledge of the soul help when the physical pain is intense? It seems that the soul feels the pain when in the body unless you are mystic yogi. Why is it hard to detach from physical pain? Although we may say mental offense is the most diificult to tolerate, in the krsna book bhrigu muni insults visnu physically and that is considered the most severe offence. I think obviously a physical offense leads to scars in the mind but a mental abuse standing alone without physical damage can be neglected by the individual with some practise.
So I don't understand how you can remember krsna more when intense physical torture in inflicted on the body continuosuly for say 2-3 months and not just 1-2 days. How one can pray like kunti then? Won't the relief from bodily pain be the main focus of the prayer rather than service to krsna?
So according to theory of soul being aloof from the body helps when you are having a cold or small cut but not when you are being burnt alive, or arrows are inserted inside the body. I wondered why it seems like the soul is suffering the pain? The human body is just too fragile.