It feels clear to me, for example, that agentic desire is inherent to pain and suffering (there has to be a thing that wants not-that for it to count as pain/suffering).
Why is this clear? People who meditate a lot often drop their sense of agency and it does come with a layer of suffering being dropped, but the baseline experience remains.
When I experience a toothache, it just feels bad on its own, like a dissonance in my experience. And when I pinch myself to cause pain, my agentic desire is actually directed in the opposite direction of pain, but the pain still happens.
People who meditate a lot often drop their sense of agency and it does come with a layer of suffering being dropped, but the baseline experience remains.
In my experience, the conscious experience of pain changes quite dramatically when the aversion is properly dropped. So dramatically I wouldn’t know that the two experiences are at all related if I encountered them separately.
Why is this clear? People who meditate a lot often drop their sense of agency and it does come with a layer of suffering being dropped, but the baseline experience remains.
When I experience a toothache, it just feels bad on its own, like a dissonance in my experience. And when I pinch myself to cause pain, my agentic desire is actually directed in the opposite direction of pain, but the pain still happens.
In my experience, the conscious experience of pain changes quite dramatically when the aversion is properly dropped. So dramatically I wouldn’t know that the two experiences are at all related if I encountered them separately.
I believe this, but it’s still impossible to “redefine away” the baseline one