As far as I’ve understood, a big idea with dukkha is that you have an intense desire for things to not be the way you perceive them to be, even though you might not have any concrete means of changing things, and the psychic pain is your constant awareness that reality isn’t the way you want. “Regret” and “yearning” both seem like good words to describe types of this, though you probably want to imagine the more extreme versions of both, not just mild wistfulness.
If you’ve looked into predictive processing, this sounds familiar. The low-level story might be something like being stuck with persistent predictive errors where you can neither update your model or act to change your circumstances.
That’s correct, the standard model of dukkha is that we have desires that can never be fulfilled and this is painful. When we wake up to our own non-separateness from the world, though, many of those desires fall away because they were powered by a false belief that the world could be other than how it is in the present moment. To have no such desires is to attain nirvana (“blowing out” or “extinguishing” as in extinguishing a flame).
As far as I’ve understood, a big idea with dukkha is that you have an intense desire for things to not be the way you perceive them to be, even though you might not have any concrete means of changing things, and the psychic pain is your constant awareness that reality isn’t the way you want. “Regret” and “yearning” both seem like good words to describe types of this, though you probably want to imagine the more extreme versions of both, not just mild wistfulness.
If you’ve looked into predictive processing, this sounds familiar. The low-level story might be something like being stuck with persistent predictive errors where you can neither update your model or act to change your circumstances.
That’s correct, the standard model of dukkha is that we have desires that can never be fulfilled and this is painful. When we wake up to our own non-separateness from the world, though, many of those desires fall away because they were powered by a false belief that the world could be other than how it is in the present moment. To have no such desires is to attain nirvana (“blowing out” or “extinguishing” as in extinguishing a flame).