The diagnosis is roughly correct (I would say “most suffering is caused by an internal response of fleeing from pain but not escaping it”), but IMO the standard proffered remedy (Buddhist-style detachment from wanting) goes too far and promises too much.
Re: the diagnosis, three illustrative ways the relationship between pain, awareness, and suffering has manifested for me:
Migraines: I get them every few weeks, and they’re pretty bad. After a friend showed me how to do a vipassana body scan, on a lark I tried moving my attention to the spot inside my skull where the migraine was most intense. To my relief, this helped the suffering greatly; the pain was caused by the migraine but the suffering was caused by trying futilely to not feel the pain, and staring directly at it was a good remedy.
Mental health: I’m chronically depressed and anxious. (I am not asking for advice about it, and there’s a unique causal element so your advice is less likely than usual to help.) One thing I figured out is that I can “wallow” in it: optimize for feeling it as intensely as possible. For example, if I’m feeling miserable I’ll intentionally lie in bed in the dark listening to my saddest music. This genuinely helps make things more bearable, and helps the worst moods pass faster, compared to the approach of trying to distract myself from the feelings or to force a contrary feeling.
Psychedelics: The worst hour of my life was spent on a bad acid trip, feeling nauseous and wanting to escape that feeling, and getting stuck in a “turning away from awareness” motion (reflected in visual hallucination by trying to mentally push my visual field up and to the left, only for it to reset to its actual location several times per second). That was a tremendous mistake.
However, my depression sometimes manifests as anhedonia, i.e. true detachment from desire, and that’s really not all it’s cracked up to be. I’m not suffering when I lie around all day with anhedonia, but I’m not getting any positive valence from it, and meanwhile I’m stagnating as a person. And I genuinely do not see how to wallow in anhedonia, to turn my awareness inward and find something to engage with. I’ve tried. It just seems like nobody’s home in that state.
A key, I suspect, is happiness set point. A person who takes up Buddhism or a similar practice, and starts to experience their preferences less strongly, ends up hovering more stably around their happiness set point without the highs and lows that come with excitement, anticipation, triumph, disappointment, etc. Lows hurt more than highs, so this mental motion is a net improvement. Most people have a pretty good happiness set point, so it feels like a good end result. (And in most cases people stop before ceasing to have preferences entirely; there’s probably even a golden mean where they’re more effective in the real world than either their natural state or a zen-wireheaded extreme.)
But I don’t see much proof that detachment from desire moves one’s happiness set point, so advertising it as a cure for unhappiness feels like the same sort of error as talking about how everyone—even poor people—should buy index funds. (Which is to say, it’s good advice on the margin for the majority of people, but for some people it’s irrelevant, and the correct first advice is more like “how to get a job, or a better job” or “how to budget” or “how to cheaply refinance your credit card debt”, etc.)
And also, I’m dubious that [intentionally reducing the intensity of your good moments] is actually helpful in the same way that [intentionally reducing the intensity of your bad moments] is? Sometimes you happen to know that a good thing is going to happen with very little risk of failure. In that case, it seems strictly better to want and desire and expect that good thing.
In short, I highly recommend turning towards experiences of pain rather than fleeing from them; but I think the Buddhist thesis is questionable.
The message of Buddhism isn’t “in order to not suffer, don’t want anything”; not craving/being averse doesn’t mean not having any intentions or preferences. Sure, if you crave the satisfaction of your preferences, or if you’re averse to their frustration, you will suffer, but intentions and preferences remain when craving/aversion/clinging is gone. It’s like a difference between “I’m not ok unless this preference is satisfied” and “I’d still like this preference to be satisfied, but I’ll ultimately be ok either way.”
Not directly related, but I also get bad migraines. Would you kindly be able to point me towards somewhere I can read something useful about the vipassana body scan? Maybe I am overthinking it but the top hits when I searched looked low value.
Good question! I picked it up from a friend at a LW meetup a decade ago, so it didn’t come with all the extra baggage that vipassana meditation seems to usually carry. So this is just going to be the echo of it that works for me.
Step 1 is to stare at your index finger (a very sensitive part of your body) and gently, patiently try to notice that it’s still producing a background level of sensory stimulus even when it’s not touching anything. That attention to the background signal, focused on a small patch of your body, is what the body scan is based on.
Step 2 is learning how to “move” that awareness of the background signal slowly. Try to smoothly shift that awareness down your finger, knuckle by knuckle, keeping the area of awareness small by ceasing to focus on the original spot as you focus on a new spot. Then try moving that spot of awareness gradually to the base of your thumb, and noticing the muscle beneath the skin.
Use Case α is harnessing that kind of awareness to relax physical tension and even pain. The next time you have a paper cut or a small burn, once you’ve dealt with it in the obvious objective ways and now just have to handle the pain, focus your awareness right on that spot. The sensation will still be loud, but it won’t be overwhelming when you’re focusing on it rather than fleeing from it. Or the next time you notice a particularly tense muscle, focus your awareness there; for me, that usually loosens it at least a little.
Step 3 is the body scan itself: creating awareness for each part of your skin and muscles, gradually, bit by bit, starting from the crown of your head and slowly tracing out a path that covers everything. This is where a guided meditation could really help. I don’t have one to recommend (after having the guided meditation at the meetup, I got as much of the idea as I needed), but hopefully some of the hundreds out there are as good as Random Meditating Rationalist #37 was.
And Use Case β, when you have a migraine, is to imagine moving that awareness inside your skull, to the place where the migraine pain feels like it’s concentrated. (I recommend starting from a place where the migraine seems to “surface”—for me, the upper orbit of my left eye—if you have such a spot.)
There’s something quite odd about how this works: your brain doesn’t have pain receptors, so the pain from the migraine ends up in some phantom location on your body map, and it’s (conveniently?) interpreted as being inside your head. By tracing your awareness inside your skull, you walk along that body map to the same phantom location as that pain, so it works out basically the same as if you were in Use Case α.
The diagnosis is roughly correct (I would say “most suffering is caused by an internal response of fleeing from pain but not escaping it”), but IMO the standard proffered remedy (Buddhist-style detachment from wanting) goes too far and promises too much.
Re: the diagnosis, three illustrative ways the relationship between pain, awareness, and suffering has manifested for me:
Migraines: I get them every few weeks, and they’re pretty bad. After a friend showed me how to do a vipassana body scan, on a lark I tried moving my attention to the spot inside my skull where the migraine was most intense. To my relief, this helped the suffering greatly; the pain was caused by the migraine but the suffering was caused by trying futilely to not feel the pain, and staring directly at it was a good remedy.
Mental health: I’m chronically depressed and anxious. (I am not asking for advice about it, and there’s a unique causal element so your advice is less likely than usual to help.) One thing I figured out is that I can “wallow” in it: optimize for feeling it as intensely as possible. For example, if I’m feeling miserable I’ll intentionally lie in bed in the dark listening to my saddest music. This genuinely helps make things more bearable, and helps the worst moods pass faster, compared to the approach of trying to distract myself from the feelings or to force a contrary feeling.
Psychedelics: The worst hour of my life was spent on a bad acid trip, feeling nauseous and wanting to escape that feeling, and getting stuck in a “turning away from awareness” motion (reflected in visual hallucination by trying to mentally push my visual field up and to the left, only for it to reset to its actual location several times per second). That was a tremendous mistake.
However, my depression sometimes manifests as anhedonia, i.e. true detachment from desire, and that’s really not all it’s cracked up to be. I’m not suffering when I lie around all day with anhedonia, but I’m not getting any positive valence from it, and meanwhile I’m stagnating as a person. And I genuinely do not see how to wallow in anhedonia, to turn my awareness inward and find something to engage with. I’ve tried. It just seems like nobody’s home in that state.
A key, I suspect, is happiness set point. A person who takes up Buddhism or a similar practice, and starts to experience their preferences less strongly, ends up hovering more stably around their happiness set point without the highs and lows that come with excitement, anticipation, triumph, disappointment, etc. Lows hurt more than highs, so this mental motion is a net improvement. Most people have a pretty good happiness set point, so it feels like a good end result. (And in most cases people stop before ceasing to have preferences entirely; there’s probably even a golden mean where they’re more effective in the real world than either their natural state or a zen-wireheaded extreme.)
But I don’t see much proof that detachment from desire moves one’s happiness set point, so advertising it as a cure for unhappiness feels like the same sort of error as talking about how everyone—even poor people—should buy index funds. (Which is to say, it’s good advice on the margin for the majority of people, but for some people it’s irrelevant, and the correct first advice is more like “how to get a job, or a better job” or “how to budget” or “how to cheaply refinance your credit card debt”, etc.)
And also, I’m dubious that [intentionally reducing the intensity of your good moments] is actually helpful in the same way that [intentionally reducing the intensity of your bad moments] is? Sometimes you happen to know that a good thing is going to happen with very little risk of failure. In that case, it seems strictly better to want and desire and expect that good thing.
In short, I highly recommend turning towards experiences of pain rather than fleeing from them; but I think the Buddhist thesis is questionable.
The message of Buddhism isn’t “in order to not suffer, don’t want anything”; not craving/being averse doesn’t mean not having any intentions or preferences. Sure, if you crave the satisfaction of your preferences, or if you’re averse to their frustration, you will suffer, but intentions and preferences remain when craving/aversion/clinging is gone. It’s like a difference between “I’m not ok unless this preference is satisfied” and “I’d still like this preference to be satisfied, but I’ll ultimately be ok either way.”
Not directly related, but I also get bad migraines. Would you kindly be able to point me towards somewhere I can read something useful about the vipassana body scan? Maybe I am overthinking it but the top hits when I searched looked low value.
Good question! I picked it up from a friend at a LW meetup a decade ago, so it didn’t come with all the extra baggage that vipassana meditation seems to usually carry. So this is just going to be the echo of it that works for me.
Step 1 is to stare at your index finger (a very sensitive part of your body) and gently, patiently try to notice that it’s still producing a background level of sensory stimulus even when it’s not touching anything. That attention to the background signal, focused on a small patch of your body, is what the body scan is based on.
Step 2 is learning how to “move” that awareness of the background signal slowly. Try to smoothly shift that awareness down your finger, knuckle by knuckle, keeping the area of awareness small by ceasing to focus on the original spot as you focus on a new spot. Then try moving that spot of awareness gradually to the base of your thumb, and noticing the muscle beneath the skin.
Use Case α is harnessing that kind of awareness to relax physical tension and even pain. The next time you have a paper cut or a small burn, once you’ve dealt with it in the obvious objective ways and now just have to handle the pain, focus your awareness right on that spot. The sensation will still be loud, but it won’t be overwhelming when you’re focusing on it rather than fleeing from it. Or the next time you notice a particularly tense muscle, focus your awareness there; for me, that usually loosens it at least a little.
Step 3 is the body scan itself: creating awareness for each part of your skin and muscles, gradually, bit by bit, starting from the crown of your head and slowly tracing out a path that covers everything. This is where a guided meditation could really help. I don’t have one to recommend (after having the guided meditation at the meetup, I got as much of the idea as I needed), but hopefully some of the hundreds out there are as good as Random Meditating Rationalist #37 was.
And Use Case β, when you have a migraine, is to imagine moving that awareness inside your skull, to the place where the migraine pain feels like it’s concentrated. (I recommend starting from a place where the migraine seems to “surface”—for me, the upper orbit of my left eye—if you have such a spot.)
There’s something quite odd about how this works: your brain doesn’t have pain receptors, so the pain from the migraine ends up in some phantom location on your body map, and it’s (conveniently?) interpreted as being inside your head. By tracing your awareness inside your skull, you walk along that body map to the same phantom location as that pain, so it works out basically the same as if you were in Use Case α.
Hope this helps!