A Look into Pain

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Jason Hymen
San Francisco, CA
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Peter
Say that pleasure is what we WANT to feel. Say that pain is what we DON'T want to feel. What if we wanted to feel EVERYTHING? If you WANT to feel it, is it still pain?
Jason


Jason,
A good question, and one that involves a very lengthy answer. I recommend the last chapter in "Ancient Wisdom," the one on pain called the "Lollipop Talk" (taken from an ontological study group you may have been in).

But to respond in brief, I would suggest that pain is a concept. Yet not a concept like most of us hold concept. It hurts! That very hurt is the concept pain. This is a difficult thing to understand and so we would need much more background on what I mean when I speak of concepts. Bypassing that background, let's just say that pain is somehow a function of the mind. Here we are making a distinction between the sensations produced by the nervous system and how those become experienced as pain. And when we speak of emotional pain we can imagine there may be no such physical sensation and yet we feel pain nevertheless. Therefore, if pain is somehow an activity of our minds, then it is produced within that domain. If we WANT to feel everything (for real and not just as a good idea) then a very significant change has occurred in our disposition to "everything." Since self depends on distinctions such as good and bad, valuable and threatening, pleasure and pain, to make its way through life, this would suggest either an aberration or a fundamental shift in self's commitment to survive, and so this is highly unlikely.

But OK -- if, in theory, such a shift did take place, we could imagine that there would be no pain. Which is to say "pain" would not be produced or added to any experience. At this point, however, we can also see that the distinctions within our "everything" include the various forms of pain that we could experience and these would no longer exist. Would we have these disappear? Or do we want to experience them? Wanting to experience something that we would normally not want to experience changes the experience, so now it isn't the same. What do we do about that? So you can see we would need to talk further on this matter.

What we are actually talking about is much more likely WANTING TO WANT to feel everything, as in "that would be neat." Although a much more superficial matter, it is still a highly significant one. Whenever we shift our disposition in any way, our experience and reactions are changed. It would be rare indeed to take a stance in the world of wanting to experience everything. Whether we experience pain or not really wouldn't matter, the context would determine the experience and so even if we said something was painful, through our "wanting-disposition" we would embrace it and so relate to it very differently than normal.

Much of what occupies us with a painful experience is not the pain itself but our reactions to it. And given our "wanting-disposition" these would probably be eliminated. But our reaction dynamics are another long story. So let's say in simple, experience is what we say it is. It is pain if we say it is pain. It is not if we don't. But remember, this kind of "saying" is not done with the mouth or intellect, it must be the same as what is experienced as "so."

Hope this has helped, or at least entertained.
Peter

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