Suppose it’s true that “our minds are composed of a large number of subagents, which share information by sending various percepts into consciousness” and I realize this through meditation, it seems that “I” remain something real (namely a group of subagents) and can still be potentially harmed or helped. Why would a group be less capable of being harmed than a monolithic agent? I’m not seeing the logic here.
Right, so I’m using a very specific sense of “harmed” here.
The claim is not that the subagents couldn’t be harmed or helped in the sense of e.g. brain damage damaging their function, things in the external world happening more or less according to their values, etc. They obviously can, and there’s nothing delusional about that.
The “harm” that I’m referring to is the alief that there’s something intrinsically bad about experiencing emotions with negative valence. For instance, I might experience stress about going to the dentist, and this is not because I would expect the dentist to do the “objective” kind of damage which you’re talking about—obviously I expect the dentist to benefit me, or otherwise I wouldn’t be going to in the first place. But I’m still stressed, because I expect the experience itself to be uncomfortable, and there’s something about that upcoming discomfort that my mind alieves to be inherently dangerous and a thing to avoid.
When you make the no-self update… well, this is getting to the territory where it’s very hard to convey in words why exactly getting an insight to the nature of the self would change that alief. Much of our conceptual system is subtly built on those incorrect assumptions, and the whole update comes from forcing the mind to confront the contradiction between its existing conceptual assumptions and the thing that it is actually experiencing when it Looks at its own operation very closely. But I’ll try nevertheless:
What triggered my “kensho” experience (scare quotes because I may again be somewhat misusing a technical term) was something like… I was trying to let go of all doing and simply observe my mind, but then “trying to simply observe my mind” was by itself a form of doing; whenever a thought like this crossed my mind, I sort of just mentally shrugged and went “well okay, if my mind wants to do something, then I will let it do so, because that by itself is also a form of letting my mind do whatever it wants and let go of doing”. And then I would feel like my mind start doing something again, and I would try not to interfere with that… and all of this gave rise to the question of “so what exactly is the ‘I’ that is doing things here, and what does it mean for me to ‘let go of doing’? If all of these are just different subprocesses getting access to consciousness, then what does this ‘sense of doing’ mean?”
At which point, suddenly, my mind flashed back to the conceptual model given in The Mind Illuminated, of the feeling of a sense of self being just another sense percept that was added to the experience as a final processing step… and suddenly on some level I knew and felt that the “I” that was doing things was not any particular privileged subprocess that was doing things, but that it was just whichever subprocess the narrating mind chose to highlight as the current protagonist of the story it was telling. Kind of like the author of a novel changing the viewpoint character between chapters. The sense of “I” was just a tag for “which subprocess has the narrating mind chosen to highlight at this given moment”.
Now why did that lead to a (temporary) feeling that pain and discomfort were nothing to be afraid of?
It was something like… when I struggle against pain, there’s an element of identifying (fusing together) with the subprocess that is fighting against the pain, rather than with the subprocess that’s producing the pain. If I’m thinking of going to the dentist and stressing out about that, then I’m fusing together with the subprocess that finds the thought of pain to be something that it wants to avoid, and there is a thought that the “I” which will experience the pain is the same subprocess which is currently active and struggling against the thought of experiencing the pain. But if there is in fact no privileged “I” and the sense of an “I” is just a tag for a subprocess from whose perspective a narrative is currently being constructed, then that makes it plausible that the subprocesses which will be active during the visit to the dentist won’t be the same ones which are currently struggling against the thought of going to the dentist. And the whole concept of the “same” subprocess is kind of arbitrary anyway and if my mind just switches to an ontology which doesn’t even include that kind of an equivalence relation for subprocesses or different mind-states, then it’s impossible to think that the “me” which will experience the dentist visit will be the same me as the one which is currently active, because there isn’t even any ontologically basic me, just different configurations of subprocesses, some of which will sometimes happen to be labeled with an arbitrary XML tag.
(But there is of course still the entirety of the system of subagents which is privileged in the sense of being the one of which future predictions can most reliably be made, and whose body is the one whose actions are the most directly influenced by whatever this system of subagents ends up deciding to do. So in that sense it’s useful to keep one version of the concept of “me” around: it’s just a useful theoretical fiction, rather than an ontological primitive.)
1) While the paper’s hypothesis still seems plausible to me, my amount of neuroscience knowledge is limited, so I don’t have high confidence in my ability to evaluate how true its claims actually are. For this post, I wanted to restrict myself only to claims which I feel reasonably certain about. Aside for the thing about the long-term nature of enlightenment, which I explicitly flagged as something I’m uncertain about, everything else in this post is something of which I can that “I’m confident that this is a thing that happens”. For that paper, my epistemic position is more like “well that sure does sound plausible”.
2) You say that transient hypofrontality sounds like a more plausible explanation of what happens, but I don’t see them as two different explanations, but rather as looking at the same thing at different levels of explanation. If I’m giving an explanation of the development of expertise, I might say something like “you become an expert by developing increasingly detailed mental representations of a domain” or I could say “developing a skill causes a (possibly temporary) increase in the amount of neurons in the regions of the brain dedicated to that skill”. Neither is wrong, one is just using a cognitive framework and the other is using a neurophysiological one.
Similarly, it’s been a while since I last read it, but I believe that the Dietrich paper is explaining on a neurophysiological level basically the same process that this post gave a cognitive explanation of. It might have been interesting to cover that angle as well (assuming that I was convinced about the correctness of that angle), but this article was quite long already, and I didn’t think that the neurophysiological side would have added enough value to justify its inclusion.
Similarly, it’s been a while since I last read it, but I believe that the Dietrich paper is explaining on a neurophysiological level basically the same process that this post gave a cognitive explanation of.
I think Dietrich’s explanation is essentially non-cognitive, i.e., the denial of self is caused by something like a hardware glitch or switch that is triggered by meditation, rather than a sequence of cognitive steps. (Similar things can happen during endurance running, hypnosis, and drug-induced states, which are more obviously non-cognitive.) Here’s the relevant part of the paper:
meditation entails sustained concentration and heightened awareness by
focusing attention on a mantra, breathing rhythm, or a number of other internal or
external events [...]
Humans appear to have a great deal of control
over what they attend to (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968), and in meditation, attentional
resources are used to actively amplify a particular event such as a mantra until it
becomes the exclusive content in the working memory buffer. This intentional,
concentrated effort selectively disengages all other cognitive capacities of the prefrontal
cortex, accounting for the α-activity. Phenomenologically, meditators report
a state that is consistent with decreased frontal function such as a sense of timelessness,
denial of self, little if any self-reflection and analysis, little emotional content,
little abstract thinking, no planning, and a sensation of unity.
I can think of several different possibilities here. 1) Dietrich’s proposed explanation is just wrong. 2) There are different kinds of “no self” experiences, and/or different ways of triggering them, some cognitive, some non-cognitive. 3) The non-cognitive explanation is actually right, and your brain is making up a cognitive explanation for what’s happening, similar to how the left hemisphere of split-brain patients make up explanations for actions caused by the right hemisphere.
Please let me know if you have any additional thoughts on this.
Ah, right, now I think I understand what you were saying.
I think the thing here is that, like a lot of old research on the topic, Dietrich does not do a very precise job of exactly what kind of meditation he’s talking about: possibly because he doesn’t (or at least didn’t at the time of writing this) realize that meditation actually covers a wide variety of different practices.
In particular, the thing that he’s talking about sounds kind of like he’s describing something like high-level samatha jhanas: probably something like the seventh or eighth jhana (note: links within that wiki seem to be broken, people curious about the earlier jhanas may want to use the book’s pdf instead).
These are indeed mental states where a meditator may end up in, if they manage to concentrate really really intensely on just one thing, to the exclusion of anything else. And from those descriptions, it really does sound like you reach them by successively turning off brain functions until you get a really weird mental state.
However, a lot of traditions—including the author of the linked wiki/book—emphasize that getting into samatha jhana states is not enlightenment. Some of them can be really pleasant, so getting into the early ones is useful for motivating you to practice your concentration skills: but in order to move towards enlightenment, you need to do a different kind of meditation, i.e. actively observing the normal operation of your own mental processes, which you cannot do if you are shutting all of them down. (Though lower samatha jhanas still keep some of them intact, so getting into a nice pleasurable samatha jhana can be useful for helping you concentrate on studying them.) That article for the eighth jhana expressly warns meditators not to get too caught up with the samatha jhanas, saying that people who do so are “junkies”:
Just to drive this point home, an important feature of concentration practices is that they are not liberating in and of themselves. Even the highest of these states ends. The afterglow from them does not last that long, and regular reality might even seem like a bit of an assault when it is gone. However, jhana-junkies still abound, and many have no idea that this is what they have become. I have a good friend who has been lost in the formless realms for over 20 years, attaining them again and again in his practice, rationalizing that he is doing dzogchen practice (a type of insight practice) when he is just sitting in the 4th −6th jhanas, rationalizing that the last two formless realms are emptiness, and rationalizing that he is enlightened. It is a true dharma tragedy.
Unfortunately, as another good friend of mine rightly pointed out, it is very hard to reach such people after a while. They get tangled in golden chains so beautiful that they have no idea they are even in prison, nor do they tend to take kindly to suggestions that this may be so, particularly if their identity has become bound up in their false notion that they are a realized being. Chronic jhana-junkies are fairly easy to identify, even though they often imagine that they are not. I have no problem with people becoming jhana-junkies, as we are all presumably able to take responsibilities for our choices in life. However, when people don’t realize that this is what they have become and pretend that what they are doing has something to do with insight practices, that’s annoying and sad.
Basically, Ingram’s saying the same thing that you were suggesting: that there’s no particular insight to be had from these states, as they’re just tripping on weird experiences that you get from turning normal brain functions off, but that people who get too attached to them may start rationalizing all kinds of excess significance to them.
(I think that I’ve personally been to a mild version of the first samatha jhana a few times, but not anywhere higher than that.)
I think the thing here is that, like a lot of old research on the topic, Dietrich does not do a very precise job of exactly what kind of meditation he’s talking about: possibly because he doesn’t (or at least didn’t at the time of writing this) realize that meditation actually covers a wide variety of different practices.
Good point, that would explain a lot. What do you think of the second paper that I link to here that tries to create a framework for classifying the various contemplative practices? If it seems like a useful framework, where does “Looking” fall into it?
Basically, Ingram’s saying the same thing that you were suggesting: that there’s no particular insight to be had from these states, as they’re just tripping on weird experiences that you get from turning normal brain functions off, but that people who get too attached to them may start rationalizing all kinds of excess significance to them.
Interestingly, it seems that there are deep disagreements between and even within Buddhist traditions about which mental states count as “enlightenment” or “awakening”, and which ones are merely states of deep concentration. See the first paper linked to in the same post.
What do you think of the second paper that I link to here that tries to create a framework for classifying the various contemplative practices? If it seems like a useful framework, where does “Looking” fall into it?
I really like that framework. This description of the deconstructive family definitely sounds like it’s talking about Looking:
Another approach would be to directly examine your experience, for example by dissecting the feeling of anxiety into its component parts and noticing how the thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations that comprise the emotion are constantly changing. In the context of Buddhist meditation, this process of inquiry is often applied to beliefs about the self, though it can similarly be applied to the nature and dynamics of perception, to the unfolding of thoughts and emotions, or to the nature of awareness.
Also, later in the same section, the paper makes a similar claim as what I was saying in my article: that establishing basic proficiency in meta-awareness / the attentional family is a prerequisite for achieving the basic skills for overcoming cognitive fusion, after which one can start developing skill in deconstructive practices / Looking:
When your sense of self is fused with the presence of anger (i.e., the feeling “I am angry”), the arising of anger is not seen clearly, but instead forms the lens through which you view experience. Attentional family practices train the capacity to recognize the occurrence of anger and other states of mind, enabling one to notice the presence of angry thoughts, physiological changes, and shifts in affective tone. This process of sustained recognition allows for the investigation of the experience of anger, an approach taken with deconstructive meditations. With this added element, one is not merely sustaining awareness of the experience of anger, but also investigating its various components, inquiring into its relationship with one’s sense of self, and/or uncovering the implicit beliefs that inform the arising of anger and then questioning the validity of these beliefs in light of present-moment experience (see Box 4). This investigation of conscious experience is said to elicit an experience of insight, a flash of intuitive understanding that can be stabilized when linked with meta-awareness. Thus, meta-awareness sets the stage for self-inquiry and allows for the stabilization of the insight it generates while nevertheless being a distinct process.
I didn’t really discuss the constructive family in the post, but I did briefly gesture towards it when I mentioned that “I think in terms of meditative practices that work within an existing system (of pleasure and pain), versus ones that try to move you outside the system entirely”; in terms of the paper, meditative practices that worked “inside the system” would probably be classified mostly as constructive ones.
Interestingly, it seems that there are deep disagreements between and even within Buddhist traditions about which mental states count as “enlightenment” or “awakening”, and which ones are merely states of deep concentration.
I didn’t read the first paper yet, but that’s definitely been my suspicion as well. There are probably a number of different states that different traditions call with that label.
Wow, thanks for this incredibly detailed comment. It clarified something for me, especially this:
It was something like… when I struggle against pain, there’s an element of identifying (fusing together) with the subprocess that is fighting against the pain, rather than with the subprocess that’s producing the pain.
It feels to me like I’ve acquired some of the skill of not fighting against pain, but I don’t think I did it by doing anything to my sense of self. It’s more like I just repeatedly noticed that experiencing pain kept not killing me.
Yeah, there are a lot of things that you can do—or which can happen to you—which will help with not fighting against pain. Just undergoing a lot of painful stuff and noticing that it doesn’t actually kill you, is definitely one as well. (there are lots of anecdotes about people who’ve gone through a lot of terrible stuff and then being totally unfazed by more mundane things, being all like, “is that the best you’ve got, reality? I’ve been shot at in a combat zone, I’m not going to get freaked out by a dentist”. OTOH, some do get traumatized and even more freaked out by small stuff.)
Meta note: the fact that pasting text into the comment box results in it being bold is a bug.
Let’s not start using bold as a convention for indicating that text is a quote. The actual quote syntax (with greater than sign) or italics look much better. Don’t they?
Suppose it’s true that “our minds are composed of a large number of subagents, which share information by sending various percepts into consciousness” and I realize this through meditation, it seems that “I” remain something real (namely a group of subagents) and can still be potentially harmed or helped. Why would a group be less capable of being harmed than a monolithic agent? I’m not seeing the logic here.
Right, so I’m using a very specific sense of “harmed” here.
The claim is not that the subagents couldn’t be harmed or helped in the sense of e.g. brain damage damaging their function, things in the external world happening more or less according to their values, etc. They obviously can, and there’s nothing delusional about that.
The “harm” that I’m referring to is the alief that there’s something intrinsically bad about experiencing emotions with negative valence. For instance, I might experience stress about going to the dentist, and this is not because I would expect the dentist to do the “objective” kind of damage which you’re talking about—obviously I expect the dentist to benefit me, or otherwise I wouldn’t be going to in the first place. But I’m still stressed, because I expect the experience itself to be uncomfortable, and there’s something about that upcoming discomfort that my mind alieves to be inherently dangerous and a thing to avoid.
When you make the no-self update… well, this is getting to the territory where it’s very hard to convey in words why exactly getting an insight to the nature of the self would change that alief. Much of our conceptual system is subtly built on those incorrect assumptions, and the whole update comes from forcing the mind to confront the contradiction between its existing conceptual assumptions and the thing that it is actually experiencing when it Looks at its own operation very closely. But I’ll try nevertheless:
What triggered my “kensho” experience (scare quotes because I may again be somewhat misusing a technical term) was something like… I was trying to let go of all doing and simply observe my mind, but then “trying to simply observe my mind” was by itself a form of doing; whenever a thought like this crossed my mind, I sort of just mentally shrugged and went “well okay, if my mind wants to do something, then I will let it do so, because that by itself is also a form of letting my mind do whatever it wants and let go of doing”. And then I would feel like my mind start doing something again, and I would try not to interfere with that… and all of this gave rise to the question of “so what exactly is the ‘I’ that is doing things here, and what does it mean for me to ‘let go of doing’? If all of these are just different subprocesses getting access to consciousness, then what does this ‘sense of doing’ mean?”
At which point, suddenly, my mind flashed back to the conceptual model given in The Mind Illuminated, of the feeling of a sense of self being just another sense percept that was added to the experience as a final processing step… and suddenly on some level I knew and felt that the “I” that was doing things was not any particular privileged subprocess that was doing things, but that it was just whichever subprocess the narrating mind chose to highlight as the current protagonist of the story it was telling. Kind of like the author of a novel changing the viewpoint character between chapters. The sense of “I” was just a tag for “which subprocess has the narrating mind chosen to highlight at this given moment”.
Now why did that lead to a (temporary) feeling that pain and discomfort were nothing to be afraid of?
It was something like… when I struggle against pain, there’s an element of identifying (fusing together) with the subprocess that is fighting against the pain, rather than with the subprocess that’s producing the pain. If I’m thinking of going to the dentist and stressing out about that, then I’m fusing together with the subprocess that finds the thought of pain to be something that it wants to avoid, and there is a thought that the “I” which will experience the pain is the same subprocess which is currently active and struggling against the thought of experiencing the pain. But if there is in fact no privileged “I” and the sense of an “I” is just a tag for a subprocess from whose perspective a narrative is currently being constructed, then that makes it plausible that the subprocesses which will be active during the visit to the dentist won’t be the same ones which are currently struggling against the thought of going to the dentist. And the whole concept of the “same” subprocess is kind of arbitrary anyway and if my mind just switches to an ontology which doesn’t even include that kind of an equivalence relation for subprocesses or different mind-states, then it’s impossible to think that the “me” which will experience the dentist visit will be the same me as the one which is currently active, because there isn’t even any ontologically basic me, just different configurations of subprocesses, some of which will sometimes happen to be labeled with an arbitrary XML tag.
(But there is of course still the entirety of the system of subagents which is privileged in the sense of being the one of which future predictions can most reliably be made, and whose body is the one whose actions are the most directly influenced by whatever this system of subagents ends up deciding to do. So in that sense it’s useful to keep one version of the concept of “me” around: it’s just a useful theoretical fiction, rather than an ontological primitive.)
Did that make any sense?
Also, I’m surprised that you give no mention to transient hypofrontality, which you’ve blogged about before. (See also this TEDx talk.)
I didn’t reference that paper for two reasons:
1) While the paper’s hypothesis still seems plausible to me, my amount of neuroscience knowledge is limited, so I don’t have high confidence in my ability to evaluate how true its claims actually are. For this post, I wanted to restrict myself only to claims which I feel reasonably certain about. Aside for the thing about the long-term nature of enlightenment, which I explicitly flagged as something I’m uncertain about, everything else in this post is something of which I can that “I’m confident that this is a thing that happens”. For that paper, my epistemic position is more like “well that sure does sound plausible”.
2) You say that transient hypofrontality sounds like a more plausible explanation of what happens, but I don’t see them as two different explanations, but rather as looking at the same thing at different levels of explanation. If I’m giving an explanation of the development of expertise, I might say something like “you become an expert by developing increasingly detailed mental representations of a domain” or I could say “developing a skill causes a (possibly temporary) increase in the amount of neurons in the regions of the brain dedicated to that skill”. Neither is wrong, one is just using a cognitive framework and the other is using a neurophysiological one.
Similarly, it’s been a while since I last read it, but I believe that the Dietrich paper is explaining on a neurophysiological level basically the same process that this post gave a cognitive explanation of. It might have been interesting to cover that angle as well (assuming that I was convinced about the correctness of that angle), but this article was quite long already, and I didn’t think that the neurophysiological side would have added enough value to justify its inclusion.
Yes, that does make a lot more sense.
I think Dietrich’s explanation is essentially non-cognitive, i.e., the denial of self is caused by something like a hardware glitch or switch that is triggered by meditation, rather than a sequence of cognitive steps. (Similar things can happen during endurance running, hypnosis, and drug-induced states, which are more obviously non-cognitive.) Here’s the relevant part of the paper:
I can think of several different possibilities here. 1) Dietrich’s proposed explanation is just wrong. 2) There are different kinds of “no self” experiences, and/or different ways of triggering them, some cognitive, some non-cognitive. 3) The non-cognitive explanation is actually right, and your brain is making up a cognitive explanation for what’s happening, similar to how the left hemisphere of split-brain patients make up explanations for actions caused by the right hemisphere.
Please let me know if you have any additional thoughts on this.
Ah, right, now I think I understand what you were saying.
I think the thing here is that, like a lot of old research on the topic, Dietrich does not do a very precise job of exactly what kind of meditation he’s talking about: possibly because he doesn’t (or at least didn’t at the time of writing this) realize that meditation actually covers a wide variety of different practices.
In particular, the thing that he’s talking about sounds kind of like he’s describing something like high-level samatha jhanas: probably something like the seventh or eighth jhana (note: links within that wiki seem to be broken, people curious about the earlier jhanas may want to use the book’s pdf instead).
These are indeed mental states where a meditator may end up in, if they manage to concentrate really really intensely on just one thing, to the exclusion of anything else. And from those descriptions, it really does sound like you reach them by successively turning off brain functions until you get a really weird mental state.
However, a lot of traditions—including the author of the linked wiki/book—emphasize that getting into samatha jhana states is not enlightenment. Some of them can be really pleasant, so getting into the early ones is useful for motivating you to practice your concentration skills: but in order to move towards enlightenment, you need to do a different kind of meditation, i.e. actively observing the normal operation of your own mental processes, which you cannot do if you are shutting all of them down. (Though lower samatha jhanas still keep some of them intact, so getting into a nice pleasurable samatha jhana can be useful for helping you concentrate on studying them.) That article for the eighth jhana expressly warns meditators not to get too caught up with the samatha jhanas, saying that people who do so are “junkies”:
Basically, Ingram’s saying the same thing that you were suggesting: that there’s no particular insight to be had from these states, as they’re just tripping on weird experiences that you get from turning normal brain functions off, but that people who get too attached to them may start rationalizing all kinds of excess significance to them.
(I think that I’ve personally been to a mild version of the first samatha jhana a few times, but not anywhere higher than that.)
Good point, that would explain a lot. What do you think of the second paper that I link to here that tries to create a framework for classifying the various contemplative practices? If it seems like a useful framework, where does “Looking” fall into it?
Interestingly, it seems that there are deep disagreements between and even within Buddhist traditions about which mental states count as “enlightenment” or “awakening”, and which ones are merely states of deep concentration. See the first paper linked to in the same post.
Those papers are a great find!
I really like that framework. This description of the deconstructive family definitely sounds like it’s talking about Looking:
Another approach would be to directly examine your experience, for example by dissecting the feeling of anxiety into its component parts and noticing how the thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations that comprise the emotion are constantly changing. In the context of Buddhist meditation, this process of inquiry is often applied to beliefs about the self, though it can similarly be applied to the nature and dynamics of perception, to the unfolding of thoughts and emotions, or to the nature of awareness.
Also, later in the same section, the paper makes a similar claim as what I was saying in my article: that establishing basic proficiency in meta-awareness / the attentional family is a prerequisite for achieving the basic skills for overcoming cognitive fusion, after which one can start developing skill in deconstructive practices / Looking:
When your sense of self is fused with the presence of anger (i.e., the feeling “I am angry”), the arising of anger is not seen clearly, but instead forms the lens through which you view experience. Attentional family practices train the capacity to recognize the occurrence of anger and other states of mind, enabling one to notice the presence of angry thoughts, physiological changes, and shifts in affective tone. This process of sustained recognition allows for the investigation of the experience of anger, an approach taken with deconstructive meditations. With this added element, one is not merely sustaining awareness of the experience of anger, but also investigating its various components, inquiring into its relationship with one’s sense of self, and/or uncovering the implicit beliefs that inform the arising of anger and then questioning the validity of these beliefs in light of present-moment experience (see Box 4). This investigation of conscious experience is said to elicit an experience of insight, a flash of intuitive understanding that can be stabilized when linked with meta-awareness. Thus, meta-awareness sets the stage for self-inquiry and allows for the stabilization of the insight it generates while nevertheless being a distinct process.
I didn’t really discuss the constructive family in the post, but I did briefly gesture towards it when I mentioned that “I think in terms of meditative practices that work within an existing system (of pleasure and pain), versus ones that try to move you outside the system entirely”; in terms of the paper, meditative practices that worked “inside the system” would probably be classified mostly as constructive ones.
I didn’t read the first paper yet, but that’s definitely been my suspicion as well. There are probably a number of different states that different traditions call with that label.
Wow, thanks for this incredibly detailed comment. It clarified something for me, especially this:
It feels to me like I’ve acquired some of the skill of not fighting against pain, but I don’t think I did it by doing anything to my sense of self. It’s more like I just repeatedly noticed that experiencing pain kept not killing me.
Yeah, there are a lot of things that you can do—or which can happen to you—which will help with not fighting against pain. Just undergoing a lot of painful stuff and noticing that it doesn’t actually kill you, is definitely one as well. (there are lots of anecdotes about people who’ve gone through a lot of terrible stuff and then being totally unfazed by more mundane things, being all like, “is that the best you’ve got, reality? I’ve been shot at in a combat zone, I’m not going to get freaked out by a dentist”. OTOH, some do get traumatized and even more freaked out by small stuff.)
Meta note: the fact that pasting text into the comment box results in it being bold is a bug.
Let’s not start using bold as a convention for indicating that text is a quote. The actual quote syntax (with greater than sign) or italics look much better. Don’t they?