We do not realize how much we all suffer unconsciously.
We know what conscious suffering is, but we tend to believe that if we are not conscious of suffering we are not suffering at all.
That notion that we can actually have pains that we know nothing about seems very
strange.
How can we be in pain and suffer the consequences of it in our body and yet not know that we do so?
We can do this because we can block the passage of nerve impulses in our body so that a pain message does not actually reach that part to which it normally would travel.
We know that naturally we do not like pain, and we know that we have some
capacity to suppress or ignore it under special conditions.
When we are faced with a survival situation in which we need all our energies to stay alive,
we feel no pain,
we are too busy fighting for life.
The fact that we can suppress pain in such circumstances proves that we can live without consciousness of it.
But this does not prove that the pains we are able to ignore do not exist.
What is pain?
Simply, it is refusal of experience.
We know what conscious suffering is, but we tend to believe that if we are not conscious of suffering we are not suffering at all.
That notion that we can actually have pains that we know nothing about seems very
strange.
How can we be in pain and suffer the consequences of it in our body and yet not know that we do so?
We can do this because we can block the passage of nerve impulses in our body so that a pain message does not actually reach that part to which it normally would travel.
We know that naturally we do not like pain, and we know that we have some
capacity to suppress or ignore it under special conditions.
When we are faced with a survival situation in which we need all our energies to stay alive,
we feel no pain,
we are too busy fighting for life.
The fact that we can suppress pain in such circumstances proves that we can live without consciousness of it.
But this does not prove that the pains we are able to ignore do not exist.
What is pain?
Simply, it is refusal of experience.