Sounds that you’ve earned your mindfulness, Renzo.
Is there something wonderful about pain? No, the proper way to approach it is to consider how a sufferer intentionally uses pain. Pain itself has no value. It is in our use of it. Inflicting pain… well, not so good. Can we stop here? Can we say no, resolve the issue by saying that the lone sufferer is in the best position to cease inflicting pain?
I would assume that most of us have experienced making our pain worse by fighting it. Then we inflict pain, self-inflicted pain. There again, there is inflicting pain on a person we think is responsible for our suffering. In neither case do we stop pain. Can we call it the “Interior Mansion,” the only place we’re able to stop suffering in its tracks.
The human species is very well equipped for making pain art. From the most subtle to the most brutish are the arts and crafts of pain. We would have to include love, wouldn’t we, as the most astonishing way to deal with pain. And don’t we have to include both ambition and laziness?
Chronic backache, passing kidney stones. Additionally, we can’t forget the pain of thinking—in order to accept we have to reject its opposite, a making impossible of unity. Emotional pain—desiring in a world where nothing can ever be possessed. Social pain—which is ontological pain, the fact that in order to be we must be separate, thus alone, unable to immediately help or be helped. Epistemological pain—that our knowledge becomes transparent under its own gaze.
What baffles me, Renzo, it that “mindfulness” is an achievement. Because once we begin we immediately realize that we could have been mindful all along, even without learning anything extra or developing further skills. What’s going on with that?
It seems so anti-climatic, so beneath mention. Very, very little separates a novice from Buddha. Like, no duh, dude! In fact, there is nothing to be studied or learned: only the simple ability to pay attention and to practice paying attention—the text of which is in the unfolding of everyday events.
Are we forced to admit that only pain can bring us to the place of living? Not pain itself, of course. In fact we cannot be essentialists at all—accepting that nothing is essential but gains value unfolding in place.
We don’t cease pain by becoming friends with it. My previous terminology was wrong. Pain continues, will always continue, I suppose. Maybe the nature of this friendship is in accepting responsibility. We continue hurting but, like in any friendship, acknowledge our role.
Do you think that of all the four letter words we use, that the word love does us the most harm? Friendship has a better reputation. I would loath to love pain, but have experienced becoming friends with pain, mostly of the common sort, and value it.
Take, for instance, the pain of loving sex. It is extreme. If we are friends with it though…!
Is there anything better than being with a friend? We understand one another. We accept one another, complete with warts. Together we face, and courageously, insurmountable odds.
It’s a mistake, I believe, to conflate these ideas with Buddhism. I’m aware of the similularities to traditional Buddhist theachings, but that’s like saying that the only way to experience fish is as sushi. In reality, a good place to experience fish is in water. Paying attention to daily events and our personal responses.
I don't think Buddhism is the ONLY way to get there, or even necessarily the best way. It was just the way that I followed, although I have not followed a religious path at all in any way... Mindfulness is the other side of the coin from Empathy, which seems so much lacking in modern times. Christ spoke volumes about it also, but to call compassion or empathy "christian" would also be a mistake.
We could emphasize teaching children to recognize their emotional states, their bodies, their needs and their indulgences. But I think we don't . If a youngster gets to that state of self awareness (among all the gadgets and distractions) it is a tribute to his or her environment and teachers (including parents extended family and friends).
Yes there are many cloaks that pain wears. Struggling against it, instead of walking around it, seems the most basic mistake. I did not find drugs to be a good solution (I tried a lot of them). Pain, like hitting bottom for twelve steppers, can be the beginning of learning to live. Woe that it could be taught before that necessity arises.
I think mindfulness is inherently secondary to our evolutionarily shaped personality (or brain) structure. "Your Brain at Work" by David Rock has an excellent introduction to the brain anatomy&electrophysiology involved. Another excellent introduction to the subject is found at MindMatters - a blog site by Grabovac (I think) - one of the authors of a scholarly article on the psychology and neurophysiology of mindfulness. It seems (from both sources) that one circuit in the brain, the "default / narrative circuit" processes items popped into working memory from storage when it is not suppressed by trained or deliberate activity of the "direct experience circuit". Activation of one or the other is exclusive, and suppresses the other when active. Only one circuit at a time. Thus when you concentrate on your breath, the default constant running commentary of our mind (sometimes negative, sometimes fantasy, sometimes projective, sometimes ruminative) is stilled. And vice versa.
I believe that the primacy of the default network must have evolved from our millions of years on savannahs of Africa where the ability to remember somewhat precisely how the big cat emerged from the grass last time it tried to kill you would protect you from another big cat attack (and allow you to reproduce again). This ability to imagine, remember, entertain, fantasize and reconstruct became(or lead to) both language and the default network of our brains. Since digging endlessly for roots to eat or hunting twelve hours per day is no longer necessary - our modern free time allows the default network to race, jump, recycle and overwork our brains - causing stress and depression and other things. That's my impression.
