Pain, Suffering, and the Belief That Makes It Worse
El dolor, el sufrimiento y la creencia que lo empeora
A student describes the struggle with uncomfortable physical sensations amplified by anxious thinking, and the teacher explores how recognizing thoughts as thoughts can dissolve the suffering that surrounds pain.
Pain, Suffering, and the Belief That Makes It Worse
A student describes the struggle with uncomfortable physical sensations amplified by anxious thinking, and the teacher explores how recognizing thoughts as thoughts can dissolve the suffering that surrounds pain.
Thank you for that part about befriending the uncomfortable sensations. I have a lot of that this morning. I'm still drinking, not as much as I used to, but it's still a bigger part of my life than I'd like. One good thing is that instead of just running for the bottle like I used to, I'm better at sitting with the feeling, letting it empty and digest, rather than trying to get rid of it with the drink. As I'm getting older, the uncomfortable sensations the following morning are much worse, and I was fighting them right when you said that, so I was very grateful for it. They're very uncomfortable, but fighting them makes it so much worse. It's tricky.
The way is through them, in a sense. And by "through," I mean being able to first be in direct contact with the sensation.
My mind can really mess it up. My mind will tell me things like my aorta is shrinking down, and all these ridiculous things.
The loop of sensation and thought
The mind is part of the loop. The mind is going to amplify the sensations and produce more. It's a whole loop of sensations producing thoughts, and thoughts producing sensations. So in a sense, you have to address both, or be with both. Being with thoughts means recognizing a thought as a thought. What happens is that the thought is what makes the sensation a problem. A sensation without thought: if you weren't able to think, you would be in full presence with sensation.
It's that thought part that'll send you to the ER.
That happens. Sometimes the extreme case, which we've both been through. But then you get through it. It can come in waves. It's this direct contact with sensation. It does release something, and it shifts the way we interpret the sensations. But the key is the believing. The thinking about it and the believing of those thoughts is what makes it a problem.
Substances really amp that up. It's a lot easier to practice that sober. You lose control when you're coming off some of that stuff.
For sure. At the same time, it might be more powerful to work through it when it's at its worst.
Seeing every thought as a thought
The key is that we need to learn to see every thought as a thought and nothing more. Then you can start to have some clarity around which thoughts are worth paying attention to, in the sense of which thoughts are practical. The mind is generating thoughts. Some of them, very few, are practical: they are tools that work and are appropriate for the moment. But most of them are not. The first work is to recognize the nature of thought as thought. There are all kinds of thoughts, and people think in different ways. But to see through thought is to see that it is just a thought and nothing more. And because it's a thought, it doesn't mean it's true.
The point I'm getting at is that when sensations are very intense, the thoughts can get scary.
It's a horrible loop.
And in that moment, what you can do is recognize that the thoughts are just thoughts. That's a practice. "It's just a thought. It's just a thought. It's just a thought."
Trust and faith
That's going to bring you to something I mentioned earlier: faith. You could say "trust." Faith has more of a religious connotation, but I'm referring to something that gives you enough curiosity to want to go beyond what you currently know. For example, something I'm saying, or something you hear someone else say, that resonates as true in a way that wasn't true to you a moment before. It points to something that seems like a truer or better way. You could call it trust. You could call it faith. It could be very gentle and incremental, or very powerful and concrete.
In my case, I met my teacher as a teenager, and it was a kind of insane before-and-after. I felt something so clear that I couldn't doubt it or question it. I didn't need to. There was no doubting or questioning. This person had something, knew something, that to me was very clearly true and real. So I never had much questioning of that. But for others it might be more incremental, where you hear something that points to something and you have to test it out, explore it, see if it becomes true to you.
So what I'm referring to is what to do with thoughts when scary thoughts arise: to see that it is just a thought.
I do that with a lot of what you say. I try it. I feel about you something like what you just described with your teacher. One thing I've tried is what we've talked about: "Why do you see the sliver in someone's eye and not the beam in your own?" I've been pondering that. I don't know if I have the answer yet, but why do we do that? It causes us so much suffering, and I do it constantly. I don't know why.
Noticing is the solution
The "why" will come to you. Don't get too worried about it. Just the noticing that you're doing it is the solution. You don't need to find the "why," because the solution is to see: "Oh, it's not about that, it's about this." Start to always come back to where the cause of the problem is. Ultimately, it has to do with believing something that's not real, that's not true.
I'm putting aside the question of what causes us to look for slivers in others. I'm talking about the core of the suffering in that moment. Then you can ask, "Why do we believe things that are not true or real?" And we can keep going back and forth, but it's always going to come down to this: because it makes you believe you're something you're not. It's the way we construct a belief in being something we're not.
You can ask, "Well, why do we do that?" It becomes a bit of a metaphysical question. For myself, I know what the answer is. I think it's a universal answer. But it's also not that important. It's something you can come to see for yourself.
The part that is hopefully practical and useful is that I am pointing to where the problem of your suffering is. There are different ways to point to it and different ways in which it works. It's a bit of an art, using language to refer to something. But ultimately it's for you to see that something was assumed to be real in a very specific way, and it is not. The reality of it is something else.
Self-inquiry and other paths
That could be what we call self, what we call "I." The path of self-inquiry says: you are believing you are something you're not. You're something else. So inquire into self to realize what self is and what it's not.
There are other paths. I recommend approaching several. For example, there's a path you could call bhakti or tantra. It's more about directly going into life and living fully and loving what is. At first it could be loving a teaching or a teacher. That's the path of devotion in relationship with a teacher, and it's a very particular path. But it could also be the love of what is, always what is now, as a practice, which can then become the realization: "I am loving everything that is." In a sense, you bypass the work of self-inquiry because you arrive at the end, which is: everything is beautiful and I love everything that is, all the time.
That sounds so great.
It's also loving the pain, not in a masochistic sense. It's the love of the source. And I run out of words there. It's the awe at the experiencing of this unknowable mystery of life, which includes the pain that is happening right now.
The kingdom of heaven from another angle
I wanted to share one more thing that relates to that. When you said "the awe of the mystery," I was watching a documentary about nothing and everything, all about the scientific perspective and how our understanding of outer space has developed over the last two thousand years. We talk about the kingdom of heaven here. But from the scientific perspective, if one tiny thing were off, if the earth spun a little faster, if there were an inch off in distance or atmosphere, so many variables, and if any of them were off by a fraction, it could be like a bad acid trip instead of what it is. So I arrived at it from another angle: this is the kingdom of heaven. We're very lucky.
It is. And until we see that, it can feel differently. That's the process. That flavor of teaching has been called purgatory: the map where you first need to be with the pain until the cause of it becomes very clear. And that frees you from it, because the pain no longer can become suffering. Then you see the problem was not the pain; it's the suffering. Pain comes and goes, and it's one percent of the thing that was difficult.
One percent of the thing that was difficult?
Pain is one percent
The thing that is difficult consists of pain and suffering. Pain is just one percent of it. When you remove the suffering, the pain is okay. All kinds of pain, emotional and physical. Obviously, there are levels of physical pain I have not experienced, and I don't want to, and I don't wish anybody to. But in what is a normal life, even a life with chronic pain, which was mine, bad chronic pain, the pain was one percent.
The narrative was ninety-nine.
I wouldn't call it the narrative exactly. I would say: the belief. Basically, the belief that I am being tortured by celestial beings. I didn't have those thoughts in exactly that way, but the underlying paradigm, the way I related to the pain, was this sense of being cursed. Something is being done to me by this life, by this universe, that I don't want and it shouldn't be. It's horrible and it's never going to end. There's nothing I can do to stop it. That could also be the way I related to small things. I'm cooking, I drop something, I make a mistake, and then that becomes a torturous thing. A lot of intense suffering around small things, but it was constant, including chronic physical pain.
Belief is what changes
Then to see, sometimes progressively and sometimes suddenly, that the nature of it was thought. The thought didn't have to stop or leave. The belief in it was what could change. It's all the difference between watching a horror movie where people are being cut up with gore and you're in it (that is your life), and then suddenly you realize you're watching a horror movie. You may be enjoying it or not, but it's no longer having that deep horror of "this is the reality of my experience." The difference there is just the belief. It's a metaphor, but that difference is the whole thing: the reality of what's being experienced, believed to be absolutely true, and then you see it's all thought.
Thank you.