Pain is the Solution to Suffering
Buddha never said life is suffering. That is a complete over-simplification of his teachings of the four noble truths. Trust me, I asked chat GPT.
Life is life, life is living. Life can have the experience of suffering. It’s understandable to conflate the two as so much of the human experience involves an overwhelming amount of suffering. You really don’t have to look hard to see suffering in others or within yourself.
Here’s where I think it’s important to get semantic.
As life is not suffering. Pain is also not suffering. Pain is the physical and emotional discomfort that comes naturally from living. Pain is an associated experience. It is felt now. It exists now. It comes with the territory of having a fleshy mammalian body and mind.
Once pain is experienced, all people have three choices. To create a positive meaning, a meaningless meaning, or negative meaning. The mind always wants to make meaning. Even more accurate: the mind IS always making meaning. This choice is the deciding factor of whether your relationship to the event will move you towards a purpose or suffering.
Let’s take an experience of walking down the street and something falling from the tree hitting my head.
First reaction, “OW, THAT FUCKING HURT!” I shield my head and quickly rub it, to assess the impact and soothe myself simultaneously. My eyes are looking behind and all around me to see if I can identify the cause. Was something thrown at me? Did something fall? What happened? As soon as the pain comes, the mind wants to create meaning.
Let’s say I cannot notice anything that I can identify as the cause of this pain. My head hurts, and when I turn around, I see nothing different. I look at the floor, and I just see the cement sidewalk with the bordering grass. I look up, I see branches of trees, no wind, no animals, no people. This makes no sense, where did this pain come from. At this point onwards, I have now transitioned from an associated experience of being in pain to a slightly dissociated experience of being hurt.
Hurt is meaningless pain. Hurt creates fear, as that’s exactly what’s motivating me. I am attempting to prevent future pain, which is another form of saying I am anticipating future hurt from returning. For the next five minutes as I continue to walk down the street, I am looking around completely in hurt. I am no longer in contact with the feeling of pain from the randomness falling on my head, but I am in the experience of fear and anticipation of more hurt from the lack of meaning of why I experienced pain in the first place.
Let’s take it one step further, I now notice a crack on the cement. The pain in my head to the searching of cause to now I am thinking about how I pay so much taxes and how poor of a job the city does. I start thinking of the corruption in politics and how the town hasn’t fixed the streets in years. Now I’m angry. I got hurt because the government’s corruption is not honoring the agreement of using my hard earned money to keep the streets safe by fixing the sidewalk and trees. I got hurt because the politicians are corrupted and are exploiting my integrity and hard work. Or, maybe I see a group of teenagers riding their bikes a block away. And I instantly conclude that one of them must have thrown something at me. In either example, now I am suffering.
Suffering is a negative meaning about pain. Suffering is not the pain, not the hurt, but an experience that comes from the negative meaning. Suffering is always multiple dissociations away from pain. The only way out of suffering is to go back up the ladder, moving towards the unknown of the cause of pain, returning to the actual pain, and then creating a positive meaning about the pain.
Take this previous example one step further, that I have noticed teenagers who are laughing from a distance. I turn around to confront them passing the very location where I experienced pain. The wind blows, and I notice an acorn fall in front of me. “OH, IT WAS AN ACORN!” I exclaim in conclusion. Suddenly, the pain now has a positive meaning. Acorns fall from trees for squirrels all the time. This is just the fact of nature itself. I have forgotten this knowledge, I have been given an important lesson to pay more attention to my surroundings while I walk outside. Suddenly, I have transitioned back from suffering to hurt to pain to acceptance.
Acceptance is merely the recognition of the positive purpose of pain. With this, I can quickly move forward into the next stage which is forgiveness – which is a fresh start that has completely let go of the demand that the perceived source of the pain change. I have no demand for trees to change, for acorns to change, for teenagers to change, for society to change. From the lesson coming from the positive meaning, I myself have changed. I am now holding myself to this new value of paying more attention when engaging through nature. This is enough for me to move forward with fresh eyes and return to my goal of having a walk.