The Wisdom of Suffering

This is in continuation of the last essay, Wisdom and Suffering.

People consider physical pain to be reasonable, but mental and emotional pain ("suffering") to be somehow "wrong".  The teaching of many a spiritual or spiritualist teacher is to move toward and eventually attain the "end of suffering".  That is misguided, to put it mildly.

To make this essay more interesting, let us annotate a particular expression of this teaching, as contained in "The two arrows - Pain and Suffering — ShamashAlidina.com".

You are walking in the woods and suddenly you get struck by an arrow (someone fires an arrow at you) and it hits your arm and it really, really hurts - it's very painful and you feel that physical pain in your arm, and it's bleeding. And then immediately your mind starts to think - "Oh my god, what's gonna happen? What if I bleed to death? What if this is infected and I can't walk back properly? Or I lose energy and I can't get back to my family? What's gonna happen to my family? What's gonna be happening to my husband / my wife / my children? What's gonna happen to me or what’s going to happen to their future, how will they be doing?”

Firstly, humans have the amazing capability to look beyond the immediate.  The physical pain is there.  But it would be infantile to just respond to that.  

To continue in the vein of the story, the thoughts of a reasonable man may be: Why did someone fire that arrow at me?  Should I protect myself from further arrows?  Is it possible that I need to seek medical attention?  Is this life-threatening?  If so, do I need to not just seek medical help, but also perhaps worry about my family?

Of course, one can be unreasonably scared, but the mind is hardly perfect.  It is perhaps only in hindsight that one can evaluate whether all the worry was justified or whether it was an overreaction.  With experience, one can learn to overreact less.

The Buddha describes the first arrow as the physical pain and the second arrow is what your mind does - it starts thinking about the worst scenario that can happen. And he says "be warned of the second arrow." 

What is wrong with what the mind does, the "second arrow"?  The mind is doing its job.  Trying to quickly and crudely respond to a threatening situation with a bumble of thoughts.  A trained soldier will respond less crudely, and perhaps know of tourniquets and how to camouflage himself to be safe from further attacks, etc., but a normal individual has no such training.  If in addition to a lack of proper training, one is foolish enough to be guided by the spiritualists to not engage the mind as it furiously scans the scenarios and possible outcomes, one is not likely to survive.

The mind evolved as a survival tool.  It is because of our mental prowess that we have been wildly successful in outclassing all other species on this planet.  Spiritualists are the sworn enemies of the mind and the intellect, because their goal is a thoughtless bliss, and not an increase in wisdom and understanding.

The first arrow is represents the pain - the actual physical pain, and the second arrow represents what you call suffering.  So we distinguish between pain and suffering. 

Mental processes are not per se, suffering.  They are the human response to a situation.  The mind utilizes its collection of learning and instincts to respond to a challenging situation.  These responses are usually far more optimal, but to give up on the mind is an even bigger mistake.  One can train the mind, but to be only in the "here and now" is an invitation to living as an animal or an infant.

Which worry is reasonable, and which worry is imaginary?  You cannot know except by experience.

Consider the response of the passengers in Flight 93 on Sep 11, 2001, a flight doomed to crash and kill them all.  They fully expect to die, and are faced with fear, and thoughts for their family.  Many of them called their loved ones on the phone to send a last message of love.  One can imagine some of them telling their wives of a document in their bedroom drawer which details the various bank accounts.  Would the Buddha have called his wife, if he was on Flight 93?

Pain is something that's inevitable, we all experience that. But the suffering is something that we actually create. But we don't realise that. 

Even pain is subjective, and is created because of a living being's response to a stimulus.  Similarly, our thoughts and worries are our responses to a situation.  This second category of response is not all fantasy.  Our thoughts and worries are usually reasonable.  Can they be unreasonable?  Sure.  

Even simple pain affects people to different degrees.  An infant screams and cries at hitting their toe, but an adult can usually act with more restraint.  Someone can enjoy a cold shower, while another may regard it as a cruel and unusual punishment.

There’s a sense of resistance to it - not accepting it, not allowing it to be there and accepting the reality of the situation. We fight with the reality of the way things are right now and so we turn the pain into suffering or we add suffering on top.

"Fighting with the reality of the way things are right now" is the very definition of life.  Only a stone does not fight.  The very process of survival is to manipulate the "reality".  One can, and would be wise to, accept things that one cannot change, but to accept everything "as it is" is supremely foolish.  As a rather crude example, if you feel a pressure in your bowels, you need to find the toilet, not just accept that pressure "as it is".  If you don't find a functioning toilet, you need to find a bush.  Not accept the absence of a toilet "as it is".  And once your bowels are emptied, you need to find a way to clean yourself, not accept the "reality of the way things are".

The more that you resist or deny or fight or argue with the pain- which is already there;, the more suffering  you experience.  

The fight with a pain is because we want to lessen it.  We fight it in many ways.  We try to find its cause, we try to soothe the injury, we try to find help, we try to protect ourselves from further injury, and so on.  "Pain" is the nerves' response to an unusual state, not conducive to one's well-being.  To just wish for the pain to go away is as childish as accepting it.  The mature response is to want to lessen it and to heal it.

That's a useful story to remember whenever you have any kind of difficult situation. It could be the difficult internal experiences - there could be a difficult emotions like sadness, or anxiety, or frustration, or anger, or it could be to do with difficult thoughts; it could be difficult sensations like literal physical pain or chronic pain. 

Consider a mother whose child has just passed away.  That mother feels immense sorrow.  We hope that her sorrow will lessen and heal with time.  

Should she, when she first receives the news, act as a robot, and process the news merely as a new factoid?

Her sorrow is in a way sacred to her.  It is the other side of her immense love for her child.  Someone who tells her not to feel sad will be called insensitive or worse.  The only way she can avoid that kind of sorrow is if she holds no love or affection for the child to begin with.  

For some mothers, the sorrow can be overwhelming, and they may think of ending their own lives.  But they rarely do.  And in such cases, where the emotional reaction has veered into dangerous territory, the community tries to help.  There are other mothers in the community who may have lost a child, and they know what the mother must be feeling.

Consider "difficult emotions" as first-order emotional responses to a situation.  The second-order response of an adult might be: "No I cannot accept that I am sad", or it can be "Why am I sad, why am I angry," etc., or it may be "I need to accept that I am sad".  It is generally therapeutic to accept the first order response but not to act unreasonably on it.  If one is angry, to accept that one is angry, but not act it out by breaking things in the house.  Even better, to figure out what the trigger was and whether it was reasonable to get angry and what can one do to fix the underlying situation.

"Anger" is a four-letter word on most spiritual paths.  "Anger" is a strong emotional disapproval of a situation and wanting to urgently do something to re-establish an agreeable or a fair state.  It may involve adrenaline and increased blood flow.  Spiritualists will likely say that it is never reasonable to get angry, or sad.  But if we consider anger and sadness as emotional responses to a situation (just like pain is a physical response, and thought and worry are mental responses), as an adult we will seek not to eliminate those emotions, but to act on them in fruitful ways and not in unwholesome ways.

Moreover, as I detailed in my essay on Suffering, affective reactions are "rough and ready" responses when a more considered solution is impractical.  An angry scream at someone bullying and beating a helpless kid is likely to be effective.

Similarly, on witnessing a poor woman being robbed of her savings by an unscrupulous criminal, or learning of how your tax dollars were diverted into the coffers of the corrupt, the emotion of anger is reasonable.  Hopefully, that anger translates into a useful course of action and not in a reckless one.

A man without emotional responses like sadness or anger, is likely also without affection for another human being, and lacking the instincts for justice and fairness.