For one thing, this “ought to be” business isn’t quite right. I prefer the world to be such that I am not in pain. (This itself is a needlessly fancy way of saying that I prefer not to be in pain.) I may or may not have opinions about how the world “ought to be” w.r.t. me being in pain.
More importantly, these two separate things may[1] co-occur, but they’re not the same thing. If I am in pain, I may indeed also believe that the world ought to be such that I would not be in pain. On the other hand, if I believe that the world ought to be such that everyone is equal before the law, it is absolutely not within the bounds of common usage to describe that view as being, or even being connected to, any “suffering” on my part.
The fact is that if you ask people what they mean by “suffering”, they won’t come up with anything even sort of like “the feeling that the world ought to be something other than what it is”; and if you ask people to pick a word that fits that description, they won’t come up with “suffering”.
This is one of the relatively rare cases where looking in the dictionary is helpful—we are discussing common usage, after all. Let’s look at couple of definitions.
Feeling of pain or strong stress, either physical or emotional. It can be correlative to the situation, or much higher. It can also be intentionally personally caused. To bear or tolerate something unbearable.
Other dictionaries are more of the same.
Nothing about “feeling that the world ought to be something other than what it is”, or anything similar.
May! But may not. For instance, if I am bored, I do not “feel the world ought to be more entertaining”. That is simply false as a description of my views or my mental state at those times when I am bored.
I think part of the point though is that (Buddhists believe) people are actually suffering during states of being that they would describe as “doing just fine”. And that (oversimplifying the view to a culty frame) the 99% of people who aren’t Buddhist or similar are clueless that this “doing just fine” state is actually suffering. So, the standard self report definition isn’t actually relevant (to this point, under this view.)
I think that there can be some light in this, an example that comes to mind is someone with phone addiction—as soon as they get home from work, they use their phone throughout dinner, the whole evening, and into the night.
An observing family member watches this and thinks, this person isn’t ever able to just sit and slowly eat dinner, or relax, or do anything, they are compelled to spend hours crouched over their device shining light into their eyes without moving, they are compulsively stimulating themselves to the exclusion of anything lasting.
The person in the addiction is just having a nice night watching interesting videos and chatting with friends while still getting to eat dinner and decompress from work. They genuinely feel they’re doing just fine.
But ten years later after they leave behind the phone addiction they might say, “yeah I was suffering, if I had ten minutes without entertainment or something to do my mind would start to get agitated and painful. Now I know it was because xyz that I didn’t want to stop and take things in, in that place. But I didn’t know that I was one day going to be able to actually relax. I thought that /was/ relaxing. From what I’d known since childhood that type of night felt standardly good.”
It’s like an archetypal dynamic… “YOU ARE OBVIOUSLY DISTRESSED AND PART OF YOU KNOWS IT and you can fix it by doing what I say” vs “No I’m doing just fine there’s just different ways of doing things and you’re not being kind by not respecting my internal experience”
… But… In this case maximalized to “everyone in society is subliminally distressed due to the society being misaligned”.
Possibly the exact phrasing that lsusr used may not be the best one. And I feel hesitant to make claims of what anyone else’s experience of suffering is. I do however feel confident in saying that whenever I suffer (in the common sense meaning of the word), it involves some degree of desire (sometimes very slight, sometimes extreme and intense) that something be different, that this desire seems to be the cause of the suffering, and that the way this desire and suffering behave seem to generally line up with the way that Buddhists talk about these things.
On the other hand, if I believe that the world ought to be such that everyone is equal before the law, it is absolutely not within the bounds of common usage to describe that view as being, or even being connected to, any “suffering” on my part.
I think this is related to the desire/motivation distinction lsusr was making in a different comment. It’s possible to consider a world where everyone is equal before the law better than one that is not, and even to work toward such a world, without that involving suffering. At the same time, it’s also possible to think of the way that people in the current world are treated unfairly and feel anguish and suffer due to the thought.
So if you just believe that the world ought to have equality before the law but don’t suffer due to it, then one might say that you are motivated to have such a world. If you feel that the world ought to have equality and also experience suffering because not everyone is treated equally, then you have desire for such a world. Desire causes suffering but mere motivation does not, and the original definition we’re discussing was inexact in not making that distinction. (I tried to sketch more of the ways that this desire—or craving as I called it—behaves in this article. I’m not sure if I’d completely endorse every detail there anymore but I think it’s at least gesturing in the right direction.)
Right the delineation is associated with motive-root identity.
It’s definitely embedded in the English language… Considering the word “insufferable”, spending time with someone who is sufferable, you can accept it, bear it, spend the whole time wishing you were somewhere else, but not with such agitation as with someone who’s insufferable.
Suffering is both unbearable and urgently agitating, but usually ongoing and outside of your control.
One aspect of it is your emotional focus toward the problem… Why is it like that, why can’t I change it, … You “suffer” more the more you think about it. Commonly with respect to other people in the community not improving, or other people in the relationship or family not being considerate. Also obviously chronic pain.)
I think a fear/disgust/contempt of Buddhism commonly has the fear that we will tune out important internal motives (to change) by tuning out this frustrated despairing agitation.
With this delineation: (
One side is:
This despairing agitation (“suffering”) does point to a motive which you need to solve for, however it is a lens on the motive and is holding you back from seeing clearer the motive and your capacities. For example, when you “ignore” a toothache by tensing the whole side of your face to not jiggle the tooth, and now your whole side of your face throbs, but you’re ignoring it so stringently that the part of you identified as a worker can’t understand why you’re finding it hard to focus.
The other side is:
There is a third variable besides suffering and motive which is actually the thing which is lensing and holding you back from realizing your motive. Engaging fully with this third, is comforting, because it can make you feel you are making progress, while still blinding you to the reality that the progression staircase is built on the same foundation. (For example the dril candles.)
)
my thinking is to consider both these sides (suffering keeps you trapped/suffering is part of growth) as only two stable positions on a seesaw, easy to reason about since they’re stable.
No, I don’t think that’s right.
For one thing, this “ought to be” business isn’t quite right. I prefer the world to be such that I am not in pain. (This itself is a needlessly fancy way of saying that I prefer not to be in pain.) I may or may not have opinions about how the world “ought to be” w.r.t. me being in pain.
More importantly, these two separate things may[1] co-occur, but they’re not the same thing. If I am in pain, I may indeed also believe that the world ought to be such that I would not be in pain. On the other hand, if I believe that the world ought to be such that everyone is equal before the law, it is absolutely not within the bounds of common usage to describe that view as being, or even being connected to, any “suffering” on my part.
The fact is that if you ask people what they mean by “suffering”, they won’t come up with anything even sort of like “the feeling that the world ought to be something other than what it is”; and if you ask people to pick a word that fits that description, they won’t come up with “suffering”.
This is one of the relatively rare cases where looking in the dictionary is helpful—we are discussing common usage, after all. Let’s look at couple of definitions.
Dictionary.com:
And clicking on “suffers” gets us:
Wiktionary:
Psychology Dictionary:
Other dictionaries are more of the same.
Nothing about “feeling that the world ought to be something other than what it is”, or anything similar.
May! But may not. For instance, if I am bored, I do not “feel the world ought to be more entertaining”. That is simply false as a description of my views or my mental state at those times when I am bored.
I think part of the point though is that (Buddhists believe) people are actually suffering during states of being that they would describe as “doing just fine”. And that (oversimplifying the view to a culty frame) the 99% of people who aren’t Buddhist or similar are clueless that this “doing just fine” state is actually suffering. So, the standard self report definition isn’t actually relevant (to this point, under this view.)
I think that there can be some light in this, an example that comes to mind is someone with phone addiction—as soon as they get home from work, they use their phone throughout dinner, the whole evening, and into the night.
An observing family member watches this and thinks, this person isn’t ever able to just sit and slowly eat dinner, or relax, or do anything, they are compelled to spend hours crouched over their device shining light into their eyes without moving, they are compulsively stimulating themselves to the exclusion of anything lasting.
The person in the addiction is just having a nice night watching interesting videos and chatting with friends while still getting to eat dinner and decompress from work. They genuinely feel they’re doing just fine.
But ten years later after they leave behind the phone addiction they might say, “yeah I was suffering, if I had ten minutes without entertainment or something to do my mind would start to get agitated and painful. Now I know it was because xyz that I didn’t want to stop and take things in, in that place. But I didn’t know that I was one day going to be able to actually relax. I thought that /was/ relaxing. From what I’d known since childhood that type of night felt standardly good.”
It’s like an archetypal dynamic… “YOU ARE OBVIOUSLY DISTRESSED AND PART OF YOU KNOWS IT and you can fix it by doing what I say” vs “No I’m doing just fine there’s just different ways of doing things and you’re not being kind by not respecting my internal experience”
… But… In this case maximalized to “everyone in society is subliminally distressed due to the society being misaligned”.
Possibly the exact phrasing that lsusr used may not be the best one. And I feel hesitant to make claims of what anyone else’s experience of suffering is. I do however feel confident in saying that whenever I suffer (in the common sense meaning of the word), it involves some degree of desire (sometimes very slight, sometimes extreme and intense) that something be different, that this desire seems to be the cause of the suffering, and that the way this desire and suffering behave seem to generally line up with the way that Buddhists talk about these things.
I think this is related to the desire/motivation distinction lsusr was making in a different comment. It’s possible to consider a world where everyone is equal before the law better than one that is not, and even to work toward such a world, without that involving suffering. At the same time, it’s also possible to think of the way that people in the current world are treated unfairly and feel anguish and suffer due to the thought.
So if you just believe that the world ought to have equality before the law but don’t suffer due to it, then one might say that you are motivated to have such a world. If you feel that the world ought to have equality and also experience suffering because not everyone is treated equally, then you have desire for such a world. Desire causes suffering but mere motivation does not, and the original definition we’re discussing was inexact in not making that distinction. (I tried to sketch more of the ways that this desire—or craving as I called it—behaves in this article. I’m not sure if I’d completely endorse every detail there anymore but I think it’s at least gesturing in the right direction.)
Right the delineation is associated with motive-root identity.
It’s definitely embedded in the English language… Considering the word “insufferable”, spending time with someone who is sufferable, you can accept it, bear it, spend the whole time wishing you were somewhere else, but not with such agitation as with someone who’s insufferable.
Suffering is both unbearable and urgently agitating, but usually ongoing and outside of your control.
One aspect of it is your emotional focus toward the problem… Why is it like that, why can’t I change it, … You “suffer” more the more you think about it. Commonly with respect to other people in the community not improving, or other people in the relationship or family not being considerate. Also obviously chronic pain.)
I think a fear/disgust/contempt of Buddhism commonly has the fear that we will tune out important internal motives (to change) by tuning out this frustrated despairing agitation.
With this delineation: (
One side is:
This despairing agitation (“suffering”) does point to a motive which you need to solve for, however it is a lens on the motive and is holding you back from seeing clearer the motive and your capacities. For example, when you “ignore” a toothache by tensing the whole side of your face to not jiggle the tooth, and now your whole side of your face throbs, but you’re ignoring it so stringently that the part of you identified as a worker can’t understand why you’re finding it hard to focus.
The other side is:
There is a third variable besides suffering and motive which is actually the thing which is lensing and holding you back from realizing your motive. Engaging fully with this third, is comforting, because it can make you feel you are making progress, while still blinding you to the reality that the progression staircase is built on the same foundation. (For example the dril candles.)
)
my thinking is to consider both these sides (suffering keeps you trapped/suffering is part of growth) as only two stable positions on a seesaw, easy to reason about since they’re stable.