Editor’s Introduction
Pain is wanting to be not aware of a sensation, but believing that we should be aware of it.
An analogy: if you were in a hotel, wanting to have a conversation with a friend, and finding it difficult to hear her because of a loud TV in another room, you might first investigate to see if the TV could be turned off. If the TV was in the lobby, you might ask the receptionist to turn the TV down. If the TV was in someone’s personal room, you might bang on the wall. If you didn’t want to (or couldn’t) take any action to have the TV turned down, you might then proceed with your conversation to the best of your abilities, unproblematically, with the TV blaring. Now, alternatively, you could instead ruminate on how the TV “shouldn’t” be so loud, and be unhappy about the noise of the TV.
In this analogy, the TV is a bodily sensation that is present to your awareness that you don’t like. If you find the bodily sensation informative (for example, you realization that your hand hurts because it is touching a hot stove), you will naturally act upon this information (and so remove our hand from the stove). If you find that this bodily sensation (for example, the throbbing of your hand after it has been removed from the stove) has no relevance to what you want, then you might first see if you can “turn it off” or “turn it down”, by taking a painkiller, for example. If you find that this bodily sensation cannot be “turned off”, then you could simply proceed doing what you want, unproblematically, in the context of this bodily sensation. Alternatively, you could instead ruminate on how the bodily sensation “shouldn’t” be, and so be unhappy about your awareness of the bodily sensation.
Pain
Relative to pain, to feel bad is to believe that lack of awareness is desirable. The need to change such a feeling is based on the decision, belief, or judgment that it is a bad awareness.
All feeling bad is about what might be our feelings in the future about our desires now, in this case, the fear of not feeling good about things we do not feel good about, but are afraid we will regret not having felt good about. It is the disapproval of the present state of feeling.
To feel bad about pain is to believe that lack of awareness of a bodily sensation is in itself a goal to strive for. Pain is believing that being aware of a bodily sensation is undesirable. Pain is trying to not be aware of something (as opposed to merely not being aware of something.)
Pain is fearing what will happen if we ignore what we choose to ignore, and do whatever we want. Pain is simply being aware of something that is not relevant to our goals now.
If there is something we want to do, we will do it if we are not busy with pain or avoiding it. Pain is not the awareness of something that is happening. It is trying to remove the awareness of the event instead of either
a) changing the bodily sensation simply because it is not desired or
b) forgetting the bodily sensation until you want to change it or do something about it.
a) Changing the bodily sensation simply because it is not desired
In other words, eliminate the obstacle which “causes” the pain but not because it causes pain, but only because you don’t want the bodily sensation, in itself, to get in your way. Pain will not get in your way until you feel it as pain and need to direct your energies to relieving the pain or trying to relieve it, or feeling it, and not doing what you would want instead if you had no pain. Awareness of wanting to change something doesn’t get in your way until you get involved with the awareness instead of the desire. Then it is pain.
b) Forgetting the bodily sensation until you want to change it or do something about it.
For all you know, the event that caused the bodily sensation is over. If the cause has passed, or if you don’t know if it has, or what it was, then pain is trying to get rid of an awareness of something that you are no longer aware of wanting to do something about.
Pain is the feeling of trying to ignore an awareness because we object to the so-called effects of the awareness and what the awareness of those effects will do to us. It is believing that your bodily functions and sensations are ruining your life, your happiness and your fun.