From: dwp+@cs.cmu.edu (Doug Philips)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.eastern
Subject: Re: Suffering and bodily pain
Summary: something salient, shortly stated, sadly seldom satoric
Date: 12 Nov 92 02:58:37 GMT
Article-I.D.: ogicse.45828
Distribution: world
Organization: EIEI-U

+    What is the source of  pain and suffering ?  The answers usually given
+    are 1, attachment, 2, desire and 3, ignorance.
+    
+    I am proposing one more : 4, Conditioning.
+    
+    Suffering of only mental origin can be taken  care of to a good extent
+    by knowledge (ignorance is the cause;  Everything in  the world  is OK
+    and  takes  place  at  the  right  time,  God oversees  everything, no
+    unfairness under the Law of Karma, etc.)
+    
+    The problem  that remained for me to understand  was how one can avoid
+    suffering from bodily pain. The following tries to explain  how it can
+    be done. I have not been very successful in practice, but I found this
+    just yesterday.

[Rest of article elided.  -dwp]

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.  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.

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.

-Doug
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