It’s not accurate to say that you’re accepting pain. What is accepted is the mediate cause of pain, such as contact between your hand and hot water, but the immediate cause of pain, which is hyper-activity that takes place within your nervous system, is actively rejected.
Both techniques can give you comfort. You can evade or destroy the mediate cause of pain (e.g. the man whipping you) or you can simply destroy hyper-activity within your nervous system (e.g. reactions that arise in response to whipping.) Both preserve or restore your comfort but there is a notable difference between the two. Namely, the former has an advantage of being able to preserve possessions other than comfort (e.g. your body and by extension your life) but it has a disadvantage in that it is a stress on your nervous system. This means it can create discomfort.
Thus, it often happens that a person, who attempts, and perhaps even manages, to evade or destroy the mediate cause of discomfort, ends up causing discomfort to himself with his own actions. This is, for example, what happens to people who over-work, over-exercise, over-think and otherwise over-act.
Discomfort makes you weak. It’s a lot more difficult to concentrate when you’re in pain than when you’re not. It acts like a gravitational force that keeps pulling you down sabotaging any activity you might be trying to engage in.Thus, if you want to be strong, you must preserve your comfort above everything else.
There is no such a thing as “too much comfort”. The problem is that people confuse inner peace (what I refer to as comfort here) with outer peace (what I do not recognize as comfort here.) There is indeed such a thing as “too much outer peace” but there is no such a thing as “too much inner peace”. It’s pretty evident that in times of great outer peace, when there are no external threats in the form of wars, that people start degenerating. But this is only because such a peace creates inner discomfort, in the form of boredom, that is very difficult to resolve.
It is my personal opinion that the fundamental decision making process of every organism with a nervous system consists in making sure that one’s nervous activation remains within the limits of comfort. Good refers to actions that are within the comfort zone and bad refers to actions that are outside of it. It does not matter what these actions are. They can be anything.
When people speak of “conscience” I immediately think of “inner peace”. And when they speak of “intuition” I immediately think of “emotional regulation”. Not that the two are the same, mind you, but I think that these people, more than anything, are speaking of these phenomena rather than what they think they are speaking of.