On Suffering and Pain. What Does it Matter So Long As We Hurt?

It turns out it matters a lot, and the difference is essential. Because pain is curable and suffering is not. I had better explain. To be clear we must first turn suffering into pain for there to be cure. In brief, suffering is not healing; feeling pain is because pain is more specific, less diffuse and has an origin, while suffering is diffused throughout the system and is vague. We suffer when we cannot reach the cause. And that often means that the cause is so deeply buried as to be unknowable. And that can mean one of two things;
1. The pain is so great that it must remain repressed.
2. The pain is so deep and remote that it is very very difficult to reach.

When those two elements exist we have generalized suffering as the agony portion bursts through but not the origin. The imprint is still there behind it all but for now it is unattainable. Pain means connection; that is why patients hurt when they do connect—my mother never loved me. What we do to produce cure is to turn suffering into pain and then into feeling: mama, please love me.

Suffering and pain are mutually exclusive; one (pain) eliminates the other (suffering). I am not discussion chronic suffering from physical causes such as infection.

Why isn’t suffering curative? Because it remains in our head and does not reach all of us. It means that it is not connected. We are constantly miserable and never know why. Because it is in our head it stay alienated from deep causes. Once we feel deeply, over months, we can read ultimate causes. The more we try to understand our suffering the less we succeed. This is why cognitive therapy cannot succeed. It means ensconced in the intellect when what we need for cure is a deep imprint. We need the opposite: letting go of intellectual pursuits and allowing oneself to drift downward to the remote past. That is not easy and most often cannot be done without professional help. Too often, we conflate pain and suffering and that prevents us from ever finding cure. Where is cure? On a lower level of consciousness. If it were on top we could say, “Oh deal I cut myself..”

To recap: suffering happens when pain/imprint is on the rise but is still repressed and hidden. Cognitive cannot achieve cure so long as it suppresses agony without focusing on deeper imprints. They give pills, which further sequesters causes, the causes that gave rise to the suffering. They get results but it cannot last. They claim it is effective; within narrow confines it can be but it won’t endure.

Suffering and pain should not be conflated, as that assures no cure. They are not interchangeable, allowing them to be treated through ideas and insights. This amounts to thinking our way to health; that believing makes it so. Once we know that deep pain lies far below the neocortex we can focus on real causes and of course, cure.