Post #17: Pain and the River Ganges

18 May 2023

Pain is difficult for all of us, and I am not better at dealing with it than anyone else. (If anything, the suspicion that I am particularly bad at coping with it—I have my reasons for suspecting it, but I won’t insist on them—is one of the main driving forces of my practice.) Meditation and all that goes with it has not solved this problem for me, but it has changed my mind in some important respects.

I used to think that pain was something robust, a product of how the mind interacts with the body, certainly, but not negotiable in the manner that spiritually-minded people sometimes adopt or affect, as if were all a mere matter of choice and could be switched off more or less at will. If you only made up your mind to it, you could be happy right now, irrespective of your circumstances, and if you had the right attitude towards your pains, they would magically disappear. Poof. Ditto, if you suffer it is your own fault, bucko. Thank you very much, maestro, but not thank you…

Nonetheless there is something to the mental involvement in pain that I underestimated before. Pain may seem like a purely physical phenomenon, as when I hurt my knee the other day; or it may seem purely mental, as when we recall mortifying or otherwise agonizing scenes from the past. But the two always flow together somehow: the hurt knee will make itself felt in the mind, and the painful memories are sure to show up in the body somewhere, although we may not be aware of it. To say that a pain is “just physical” overlooks how we experience the world through the mind whatever happens; to announce that it is “just in the mind” is not saying much considering that everything plays out in our minds ultimately. That does not make it any less real or any less torturous.

So pain is real (if it needed any insisting on), not something we merely imagine or that we can wish away whenever we put our minds to it. Pain is the mind-body’s way to warn us that something is wrong. We would not be better off without this signaling: it is what teaches us, as children, not to bang our heads and limbs against tables and walls, and it is what keeps us, as adults, from doing a myriad other careless or stupid things that can easily kill or severely hurt both ourselves and others. To be born without the ability to feel pain is not a blessing, it means that you will most likely die young, or else wear yourself out at a shocking rate and be old before your time.

Pain also teaches us more subtle lessons, such as what patterns of behavior not to repeat around others; without this kind of chastening, awful as it feels, we would never learn to be reasonably well-adjusted and responsible human beings. Again, those who lack this susceptibility to social pain are not to be envied: they are either incapable of functional interaction altogether or, like psychopaths, they have to learn to simulate reactions that instinct does not give them. And that’s not a good place to be, needless to say.

Pain is inescapable whatever we do, no matter how prudently, skillfully, decently, and intelligently we live our lives. It need not be a deserved punishment at all; in the physical realm, it ravages the blameless and the good as mercilessly as the heartless and the wicked, and mental pain has been known to torment saints with particular ferocity. Relying on pain-killers, while they can be a godsend, is not an advisable overall strategy in life, despite the great temptation to all of us in that direction. Religion is the opium of the people, Marx famously declared; but what is so bad about a pain killer that does not cloud your mind unduly and does not harm your health, he did not say…

But there is a better way, slow and inefficient perhaps, but safer and more effective in the long run than the more palliative options. Our pains are real and important as calls to action that we must not simply ignore or suppress; but they must also be interpreted, and they have a way of going far beyond what is necessary to make us get the message. When they are no longer needed, they cannot just be switched off with a flick like more convenient alarms—but something in this direction is still possible.

To look at it from a Vipassana angle for a moment, even most students doing their first retreat often discover that pains coming from the same place really do change without any very significant shift in the surrounding conditions. The back or the knee that kills you one hour gives you no trouble the next. And sometimes, when one’s meditation deepens, one can watch even intense pains slowly fade away before one’s inner eye. I am not qualified to explain this phenomenon in all its complexity and profundity, but the way I understand it, very simply, is that while the original pain signal is automatic (it would not be very useful if it weren’t, think of the classic hand on the hot plate), how it will develop from there does depend on the mental reaction we have towards it. If we fight and resist it, the mind will keep treating it as a sign of danger that hasn’t passed, and it may even intensify—think how miserable even a harmless mosquito bite can get if you only focus on it single-mindedly enough and keep revolving around the spot with unrelenting resentfulness. (“Why must I suffer like this?” and “How come the world is so wretchedly, so unjustly designed?” are enormously effective intensifiers.) But if, instead of feeding the pain, you can make yourself observe it more dispassionately, you will find that it will indeed fade eventually, perhaps even go away altogether.

Under the magnifying glass of meditation, you might discover that there are always, around the painful zones, all kinds of other sensations that you are losing sight of when you get more and more agitated over the agony. And if you become aware of these sensations and give them some attention, they will soften the overall discomfort or misery. This is not a matter of ordering the pain to go away; if that is your intention, you are still fighting it by other means and thereby reinforcing the reactive pattern. That is why you should not, when meditating on your sensations, try to ignore the unpleasant bits; you need to cover everything, as impartially and equanimously as possible, both what attracts the mind as pleasant as what repels the mind with its unpleasantness. The more you can just see sensations unfolding before you, now coming, now going, forming an endless pattern of intricate mind-moments, but nothing that calls for judgment or attachment, the more they will lose their power to cause you misery. (The joy will not go away; it will just turn in new directions.)

Vipassana meditators will focus their efforts on such a detached observation of the sensations on the body, but even non-meditators can apply a related method. The thoughts and feelings that course through your mind and body all the time can either be treated as defining features of who you are—all mine, mine, mine, with often agonizing consequences—or they can be understood as passing phenomena, ultimately much more impersonal than they seem. It’s not that you merely imagine the horrors of the past when you recall them to your mind; but they are long past, and now they are thoughts and feelings that you can either cling to as who you are, or else treat them as visitors that come and go, usually uninvited, and that will not be shown the door just because you would like them out. If you treat them with reserved courtesy, having a friendly but non-committal conversation with them as it were, then they will be much more inclined to go eventually than if you keep goading them with your resentments and recriminations.

Even right now, in the very present when something is truly happening to you that cannot be treated as a mere memory of the past or a projection into the future (both shadows, not the real thing), you might find, with practice, that it can be treated as happening not so much to you as to a friendly stranger whom you can watch over and look after with good-will, but with whom you do not in fact need to identify yourself completely. I am not talking about dissociation, which is taking this mechanism so far, to escape the intolerable pressure of severe trauma, that you end up being unable to feel things that you need for an emotionally healthy life. Nobody said anything about not feeling! Go ahead and feel it all, without trying to evade the least part of it, but also without making it all about you. Imagine yourself sitting by a river, watching the stream of things flow by: you see it all, even very unpleasant things (like dead things and all manner of human and animal detritus flowing down the Ganges, but also flowers and other delights), and you let it pass by with a smile, whatever it may be. The Buddhists (and not only they) insist that you are not those waters; from a higher perspective still, you are not even the observer. There is just flowing and observing going on. But that’s not something to be intellectualized, which is all I can offer; if one truly grasped its meaning, one would be free, they say. I believe it; but that is for another day.

For today, focus on taking a more detached view of things and try to see things as a well-meaning stranger might, with sympathy and compassion, but without the acute sense of agony that comes from my sufferings, rather than the sufferings of sentient creation in general. When the pain gets too much and there is an effective, unproblematic remedy, go for it; I am not talking about an endurance exercise for Dhamma heroes. I get pretty bad headaches sometimes, and when I do, I turn to my friend Advil; sometimes I even take two if I need to. But I can attest to the fact that if I can manage an hour’s sitting in that state before I reach for the pills, the pain is far more bearable; sometimes it even goes away. Presumably the underlying cause has not changed; but our pains are only signals, remember, and when we’ve gotten the message, we don’t need them anymore. So we can train ourselves, slowly but surely, to switch off the alarm when it has served its purpose; but it takes some doing, to say the least.

Even if none of the above helps at all, there is one last line of defense, perhaps the most important of all: This too shall pass. Anicca. No matter how much you may be suffering in this moment, it will change. There are wholesome things to speed up the process too: exercising almost always helps, and so does resting if you are not so agitated that it is impossible. Eating too, not in excess to drown out the pain but with moderation to give yourself energy. Friendship makes a great difference, and love of course— giving at least as much as getting. Try doing something, anything, for someone else when you are suffering and be amazed how much it puts your own miseries in perspective.

There is much else that may work for you in a crisis, but no magic bullet can solve your problems with one pull of the trigger and make your pains go away magically and for good; the promises in that direction may deliver for a while, but they have a way of backfiring on you before long. So better to steady yourself for the long haul, the grueling marathon of life that nonetheless has so many redeeming parts, as we all know in our better moments. Hang in there; the worse things look right now, the likelier they are to get better soon, at least a little. And if they seem altogether unbearable for the moment, just remember that you do not need to endure them forever, just for a little while longer.

(This one is for Eugene.)