Pain and Suffering.

People are wont to treat the words ‘pain’ and 'suffering’ as synonymous. They’re not, of course. Pain is a mental phenomenon, suffering the emotional reaction to it. That much should be obvious. The interesting question concerns the extent to which we can separate the two.

There’s a well known tenet of Vedanta which might be paraphrased as ‘pain comes whether you want it or not; suffering is a matter of choice.’ In the film Lawrence of Arabia, Lawrence puts out a match slowly with his fingers and says to his sergeant ‘Of course it hurts. The secret is not to mind that it hurts.’ And while it’s widely accepted that the higher animals feel pain just as much as humans do, the extent to which they suffer from it is open to question.

 

This isn’t something I would want to go into at length. The vagaries of individual tolerance and emotional reaction make it complex, and some of the questions are simply unanswerable because no one can truly feel what another person or an animal feels. I just think it’s an interesting subject to consider.

 

And I need to say that I’m talking about physical pain here. The line between emotional pain and suffering is more blurred. In fact, it might not exist at all. It could be argued that there is no such thing as ‘emotional pain’ in an objective sense. Suffering might be all there is, although the fact that some emotional difficulties have their basis in chemical aberrations leaves even that one open to argument.

Making sense of the human condition is rarely simple, is it?