on suffering:

I’m not finished with this yet, but, as far as I can tell, so far, suffering is, always, 100% of the time, all of it, a malleable contingency. We have specialized pain circuitry. But pain and suffering are different, etc., etc.. And, as far as I can tell, we have an initial propensity to suffer, but suffering is not hardwired, at all.

That is, at some point, in the very first few moments of conscious, the bodymind system somehow makes the choice to suffer, because that’s the best option available, to keep things going.

We could call the result of each such choice a (reversible) commitment (in general).

And those (reversible) commitments to suffer, thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions of little commitments to suffer, get “locked in,” layered in, by millions of not-necessarily-suffering-related commitments, on top of that. This is just all the rest of the karma of life, and/or the technical debt of life, non-meaning-laden, meaning-laden, and so on. Commitments to suffer beget commitments to suffer, and so on. And stuff piles on, on top of that, and mixed with that, holding the previous commitments mostly in place, accumulating mostly like that. Some things do reach something of an equilibrium, of adding and subtracting. And, sometimes these commitments are latent, or sometimes they’re triggered, activated, by internal undoings/rewinds, or internal or external events.

So, in any moment, if there is suffering, that suffering is the result of hundreds of thousands, or even millions of pre-reflective commitments, by the time we’re finally conscious of that suffering. It's like in each moment, every few tens or couple hundred of milliseconds, we live through, compute through, our entire life history, from the first moments, to now, and we're only conscious of the last bit. (And, that computation is malleable, reinterpretable, and so on; that's what meditation is.) So, certainly there might be stopgap, self-care, preemptive or management or mitigation strategies, with respect to that conscious suffering. But, if conscious suffering is happening, then there’s a sense in which it was inevitable, already in motion, tens or hundreds of milliseconds ago. (I say this not to demotivate self-care but to motivate self-compassion.)

Part of meditation is finding one’s way back to those first several million commitments to suffer. And that requires millions upon millions upon millions of undoings or structure-preserving-transformations, to solve, dissolve, to create slack and play, a new settling, and to “move things out of the way,” and, not the least of which, to continue to live one’s life, while finding one’s way back to all that original suffering (among plenty of other things).

And when one gets there, one has the optionality, maturity, reflectiveness to (spontaneously, intuitively) choose something different, perhaps again and again until it's effortlessly, costlessly just right. And it’s not wireheading, or ignoring life, or running away from life, or lobotimizing oneself. (There's a failure mode of blocking, numbing, self-suppression, twisting off, zombification; but, with proper application of things like the meta protoco, this is not that; it's the farthest thing from that.) It's not wireheading, because, the bodymind will only give up a particular commitment to suffer, if the mind has truly found something better to do instead, something as or more safe, as or more a sure thing, as or more effective, as or more vigilant, self-protective, proactive, self-caring, self-motivated, vital, alive, and so on. So when one gives up a little bit of suffering, one can be sure it’s really, truly safe to give up that particular little bit of suffering. And eventually it starts happening a lot. And perhaps it’s possible to find all of it, even accounting for the possibility of extremely dire health events, heart attacks, stabbings, whatever, and personal and intimate misfortune. Perhaps there is just courage, love, compassion, empathy, self-care, other-care, and so on. But no suffering. And if there hasn’t been suffering for awhile, but more is uncovered, there is no suffering in response to that suffering, and soon that suffering is no longer there, either. And so on.

(Importantly, someone might be moved to express anguish, pain, sympathy, something, from the very bottom of their soul. They might cry, they might display and experience(!) strong, contextually appropriate and ego-syntonic emotion, the felt right emotion for self or occasion. Not a zombie. Sensuous, feeling, alive, self-aware. But that’s not the same as suffering. Is anguish without suffering still anguish? Eh, details/words. Probably straightforward to work out when one gets there.)

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Suffering goes down via/by many vectors, little by little and sometimes in (nebulous) stages. One is a sort of "self-reflexive uncoiling," or diaphanous "laying flat," almost like it was a "trick" of perception, and, sensation, including sometimes pain, remains but (there is) nothing left to suffer (this can be by degree, or piecemeal, or in stages, too); yet, even then, or along the way, there can sometimes still be I-ness or subjectivity, and that's fine! (((((((And all this can (generally) only (stably) happen when it's safe, by agreement, when it's really, truly safer, better than the alternatives, in terms of cares, concerns, safety, etc. ((((((((as in no shortcuts, no corner-cutting, have to go back, etc., etc., etc.))))))))))))))))))))))))