From: abulsari@aton.abo.fi (A. Bulsari)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: Re: Suffering and bodily pain
Date: 16 Nov 1992 22:09:29 -0800
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Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: sandman.caltech.edu

In article <45828@ogicse.ogi.edu> Doug writes:
>I am somewhat confused by your use of the term "suffering".  From what
>I could understand in what you wrote, you use "pain" and "suffering"
>interchangably.  

Pain  and  suffering  become  confusing terms  once one  realises  the
emptiness of the  concepts that were  created  in the first  place  by
conditioning. I  used the term pain for any physical feeling - usually
unpleasant,  but  at times  pleasant. Suffering  is  in the  mind. The
interpretation  of  the  signals  from  the  nerves  results  in  that
suffering from pain. The mind sometimes  interpretes those signals  of
pain  not  as  suffering  but as  something  pleasant.  So  it becomes
difficult to define pain. Suffering is a dislikeable feeling generated
in the mind.

To me, it is very useful to distinguish between
>"pain," as sensation (or a certain kind of sensation) in the body, and
>"suffering," as the mind's reaction to bodily sensations.  Upon further
>reflection, I think "pain" is kind of hard to pin down.  Sometimes a
>sensation of cold can be intense enough to register as pain, sometimes
>a sensation of heat can be intense enough to register pain, and
>likewise with other sensations.  So pain might be thought of, at least
>in some cases, as an extreme of sensation.  Suffering, at least to me,
>is a purely mental reaction to sensation as "bad, to be avoided,
>feared, etc", or sometimes "to be prolonged" in which case the
>suffering is caused by the extinguishment of sensation (say the wearing
>off of a drug high).

>I think you made a good point in showing how conditioning contributes
>to sufferring.  Just this past summer I read Stephen Levine's "Who
>Dies?" in which he talks about pain in the context of the terminally
>ill.  Levine has several meditations that one can perform (or that one
>can aid others in performing) in which one can learn to experience
>their pain instead of automaticly reacting to it and just as
>automatically creating suffering.  By stopping the reaction and
>allowing the meditator to examine the sensation(s), Levine often found
>that the meditators experienced less pain, and were often able to
>reduce or even eliminate "pain" medication or other traditional medical
>responses to pain.

This is indeed what one would try to do once one realises that pain is
caused  by  conditioning  of  the mind.  Stop  and  think  of what  is
happening, and  why  your  mind  (which  is not your  self)  wants  to
interprete it as pain. To take a small  step, one can teach oneself to
enjoy cold by telling one's mind that it is supposed to be pleasant.


>So, I guess what I am saying in response to your message, is that I
>think of pain as a kind of bodily sensation, which neither can nor
>should be eliminated any more that touch, hunger, sleepiness should be
>eliminated, and that I think of suffering as a purely mental/mind
>reaction to bodily sensations, and which is open to examination and
>re-evaluation.  Perhaps in that evaluation one might decide that the
>term "pain" is not a precise enough term, or that it has connotations
>of judgement which make its use confusing.

>Thanks for posting that article, I hope to see more along these lines.

I will think a little more on these lines and I have some ideas which
can be discussed.

With regards,

Abhay


>-Doug
>-- 
>---
>email to: dwp@willett.pgh.pa.us is preferred to From: address but both work.