Pain and Sufferings

“Without pain, there would be no suffering, without suffering we would never learn from our mistakes. To make it right, pain and suffering is the key to all windows, without it; there is no way of life.” ~ Angelina Jolie

“He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes

wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.” ~ Aeschylus

"A word of clarification is in order here, as the terms “pain” and “suffering” are often used interchangeably. It is important to make some distinction between them, even if such a distinction remains permeable owing to our imperfect knowledge.

A physical harm, like an injury or a disease, is likely to cause pain. Pain is a physical sensation. So pain is often a warning that something is physically wrong. If you accidentally placed your hand on a hot stove and didn't feel pain, your hand would not last very long. Similarly, if you didn't feel pain from a cavity in your tooth, you’d end up losing the tooth itself. There are exceptions—“phantom pain” in amputated limbs, metastasizing cancer without any painful symptoms—but on the whole, pain is meant to signal you that something is physically wrong and needs attention.

Suffering, on the other hand, is a mental state. As with offense, you must usually be a willing accomplice in order to feel it. Other people can inflict pain on us against our wills, but very rarely can they make us suffer without our tacit consent. Ironically, people who are closest to you and who know you best can often make you suffer most. Why?

Because they know what makes you tick, and therefore know exactly how to recruit you and enlist you as a willing accomplice in your own suffering. At the other extreme, those who know you least—that is, total strangers—can also make you suffer most. Why? Because: they may choose to disregard your humanity, and impose conditions on you that are intolerable. However, please realize that while pain can be inflicted on you by someone else (or indeed by yourself), suffering cannot be inflicted on you in this way. You can be afflicted by external circumstances that increase or decrease your tendency to inflict suffering on yourself, but that suffering is your own. In one sense, this is good news: if you own your suffering, you can also disown it. You cannot do this so easily, if at all, with pain.

However, pain and suffering can also be related at times. In cases where disease causes acute or chronic pain, it also causes acute or chronic disease (suffering) on account of that pain. Pain hurts the body to begin with; suffering is pain’s echo in the mind. We say that people “suffer” from migraines. We mean that migraines cause blinding pains and other unpleasant symptoms, which in turn cause disease (suffering) because of the pain, unpleasantness and incapacitation. If your suffering comes from pain alone, then to alleviate the suffering you must alleviate the pain. That is a medical problem, not a philosophical one.

Similarly, people who are chronically depressed because of a brain disorder also suffer chronically from the mental echo of that disorder. They generally feel the suffering and not the pain, because the brain itself isn’t pained by its disorder. Yet when they take medications that correct the brain’s neurochemical dysfunction, their suffering abates. At least, that particular form of suffering ends. They may then need to deal with other forms of suffering, such as moral dilemmas, which are philosophical in origin. In some cases, like bipolarity, they may prefer the disease to the cure: Medication prevents them from sinking too far into the depressive phase, but also “cuts” the exhilarating and creative peaks off the manic phase. Some would rather suffer from the periodic depressive state than suffer because they can no longer attain the summit of their creativity. Such difficult choices fall more simply into Aristotle’s category of the lesser of two evils, and more complexly into the modern paradigm of rational choice theory.
Philosophy is helpful when you are suffering—but most likely not in acute pain. Those who seek philosophical guidance or any other kind of talk-therapy, are usually suffering from something. Nor is their suffering caused by a brain disorder. They are physically and mentally functional people, who have created or encountered circumstances that engender or promote their state of suffering. They want not to suffer, and they rightly look upon dialogue as an instrument that both reveals the causes of their suffering, and points to a way beyond it. In the ancient world, philosophy was called “medicine for the soul,” or “the cure of souls.” It did this job admirably well.

To summarize: pain comes from disease; suffering from disease.
There are five ways in which people commonly respond to suffering: (1) they internalize it, (2) try to escape from it, (3) pass it on to others, (4) end it in themselves, or (5) transform it into something helpful. The first three ways are not recommended, because rather than alleviating suffering they tend to increase it. The fourth way is better, but is ultimately flawed. The fifth way is best. Transform sufferings into Help for Others.

Thus the very best thing you can do with your suffering is to transform it, from something hurtful to you to something helpful to others. If at all you do is end your suffering within yourself, then that is good for you— as far as it goes. But if you continue to perceive suffering in others, and want to help them end it in themselves too, that is good for everyone. And even if you can’t fully disown your own suffering, you can help diminish it by helping diminish the sufferings of others. If you can manage this, you will have transformed your own suffering into other people’s non-suffering, which is the greatest achievement anyone can aspire to in this life. Now the million dollar question is – “Would you be wise enough to transform your suffering that is hurting you to something rewarding and helpful to others instead of cribbing upon your suffering?”