BHelmet said:
A person can talk about pain or suffering but WHY does a person call it pain or suffering?
It's just a conventionally agreed upon label (although I'm sure there's some 'green language' involved).
What IS the nature of pain or suffering?
I'm not sure that's a particularly good question - I mean, the way you've worded it. What do you mean by nature?
I think a more useful question would be, "What is the purpose of pain or suffering?" Because that makes sense; its purpose is to tell us that something is wrong.
Now, how that relates to conscious suffering is different to unconscious suffering. Our mind and physiology are set into a collection of micro personalities, right? We get hungry, we become one person; we get humiliated, we become another person; we get excited, we become another person.
If you're still alive, that actually means that your little i's have done the job they were supposed to do: Get you into adulthood. So the pain we experience from conscious suffering, is the mind and body saying, "What the heck do you think you're doing! What we've got WORKS! You'll get us both killed! I can't let you do this because it is wrong!"
Struggling on in quiet desperation, having to watch t.v., eat junk food, drink alcohol, get into unhealthy relationships, act out in ways that you wish you hadn't that make your life worse; not do what you feel is right; putting up with family and friends who don't really care about you and so always feeling alone and unloved; getting older, getting fatter, getting onto the medications prescribed by your doctor; ending up seriously ill, wishing you'd lived your life authentically but now it's too late...
All the while, the above person is suffering mentally, physically and emotionally, because these aspects of the person are screaming that there's something seriously wrong with their automatic and unconscious way of life.
The deeper causes and mechanisms of suffering are important to suss out. [...] I think it is necessary to analyze the pain and suffering in order to really consciously choose or our choices may just revert to the default mode.
Absolutely. It's necessary to deeply analyse everything in your life that you can become aware of. However, if you've got your hand in the fire, are you as bothered about knowing why it's burning you and analysing the properties of the flame and with your free unburning hand, googling for info about nerves and skin and muscle and tendons and trying to link it all together?
My point is, suffering is one of the most real things; it's one of the things no one can deny. If I say to a five year old, "I banged my head yesterday" they don't need an explanation of what that means: pain is a human universal, whether it's physical, mental or emotional.
Consciously choosing discomfort because it is not the default mode is not necessarily the answer.
To what question? The point of choosing conscious suffering is not simply because it isn't the default mode. It's because, sooner or later, you're faced with a truth, which leads to a question. "There is suffering, and you cannot avoid suffering. But you can choose your suffering." So would I rather suffer with or without purpose?
(especially for the masochist ;D) There were monks who consciously chose bodily mortification to combat certain natural bodily functions they viewed as "sinful" but this didn't necessarily bring consciousness or holiness.
But they weren't engaged in the Fourth Way, like we're supposed to be. And you can't assume that they didn't acquire something of significance from their practices - it's just that, all the time they spent cloistered away making love to their own egos, they could have been out in the real world making a difference to other people's lives.
Doing the opposite of the mechanical default can become just as mechanical.
Yes, but the Universe always notices when that's happening, and to the sincere seeker, it always gives a good, hard kick in the pants. It's also the reason why we need a network.
This is akin to the forces of sleep redoubling their efforts once we start to wake up. I think it is also possible to consciously choose your mechanical suffering, to add an additional twist to it.
Totally agree; I did it myself. But you know the biggest problem with choosing mechanical, automatic suffering? It is by definition the height of selfishness. That's all well and good if you're completely detached from anyone else, but when you live and work in a society, you're connected to others in myriad ways - even people you don't know - and a selfish person brings pain and suffering to other people, pain and suffering that is then itself haphazard and arbitrary; and one has become a representative of chaos.
Anyone with a spark of conscience can't live like that forever.
So, why do we accept the suffering? In some cases it is because the alternatives are all assessed to be "worse"; unchangeable, as you say; OR perhaps (even better!) at odds with our 'aim'. So a current 'pain' can be consciously chosen, especially if it is aligned with an aim. Whether this makes it more tolerable is beside the point. In fact, perhaps IF the suffering/pain is more tolerable, that could be an indication that we are back in default mode of maximizing comfort and avoiding what we "don't like".
What's wrong with that, though? And by that, I mean, what's wrong with realising, you actually can make life better for yourself, but it's going to be hard work? There would be no point in the work if it didn't bring benefits. You just have to get your act together, stop pitying yourself and become an adult, wake up to the fact that you might have a moral obligation to be something more than an automaton wallowing in its misery and not doing anything about it because it can all be philosophised away.
That's why becoming conscious of your suffering (waking up the emotional centre, I guess) is the prerequisite: if you don't actually become conscious of the reality of pain and suffering, you can't become aware of the fact that they're real and serve a purpose and they can't be philosophised away.
