Could you say the same applies to all matter then; all of it at whatever level, being a ‘movement away’ (a separation, distance) from the ‘One’? (The Undivided)
As in “All is suffering”?
Krishnamurti says that seeing is the only truth. Of course you must understand it in the context it is stated so, but for the purpose it means when something is clear it isn’t a matter of opinion or choice, it is just so.
Apparently this statement is confusing, please let me try again.
Suffering (or the emotional resistance of experiencing “what is”, due to the comparison with what I feel “should be”) is based on desire and aversion, aka what I want & what I don’t want (aka good stuff and bad stuff).
What I want means something thanks to the I. Amorphous desire is given more power by the image of the wanter. Identification with the subject that wants and an image of the object of desire is apparently useful - in that it offers more tactics and motivation than primitive experiences that do not include a self-center.
nb. we are discussing our human experience, not explaining metaphysics or absolute truth
In my model of the universe (20/26 above) ‘amorphous desire’ could possibly be ‘things’ wanting to reunite or return to the ‘creator’ or the origin? (Big Bang) And our big brain which came up with the concept of a self or center, grew out of this ‘longing’ (to get back to the Garden?) but so far has been a ‘bust’? Suffering.
As in, ‘You can’t go home again’?
But K’s message is that you have never left! That the ‘separation’ is an illusion, a cloud of darkness created by the ‘self’! It is the self’s seeking freedom that maintains the cloud. There is no division, no observer / observed, etc, etc! It is a message of joy!
To aim for union is to live in separation.
To aim for joy is to want.
First accept death, then love is.
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What are we supposed to understand by “primitive experiences”?
The self isn’t real, so it can’t do anything. But the brain is programmed to sustain the illusion of I, the do-er, by its streaming consciousness and reflexive reaction to awareness.
Thanks for the explanation. Fight reality and eventually you’ll (probably) lose.
I was referring to the ways our ancestors were reacting to their environments. Back before brains like ours came on the scene - eg. amoebas and other simple organisms
Sorry to quibble, but “reality” (in the K world) is what I choose to believe it is, and “actuality” is what actually is.
Fight what is and eventually you’ll (probably) lose.
We are fighting what-is, and there’s nothing to win but a battle once in a while, and a lifetime of delusion.
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You probably recognised this as being vaguely Buddhist - so your brain went aha!
But just to quibble : you were actually confused about the other bit (ie. how self empowers suffering)
To be precise, in the bible suffering is the knowledge of right and wrong - a knowledge which is necessarily accompanied by a sense of self (in order for right and wrong to have meaning)
In other words : The purpose of the self (the feeling/idea of being the central character in existence) is to suffer. ie. give weight to the movement away from what is
What I want means something thanks to the I.
Amorphous desire is given more power by the image of the wanter. Identification with the subject that wants and an image of the object of desire is apparently useful - in that it offers more tactics and motivation than primitive experiences that do not include a self-center.
Like up and down, good and bad need a reference point - to whom the discrimination is being applied to.
You are using logic, which is not my mother tongue, but I’ll give it a shot.
- x is y, suffering is division into good/bad
- y requires z, division into good bad requires a divider
- therefore the purpose of z is x, the purpose of the divider is to suffer
But, as I see it, z being required for y and y leading to x doesn’t necessarily mean the purpose of z is x. The purpose of z could be something entirely different. x could be a side effect, epiphenomenon. My AI friends tell me this is “confusing correlation with causation or purpose.”
We may be using ‘purpose’ differently? You may think of it as correlation? I definitely agree with this. To quote my Buddhist teacher (back from the day I was a member of a sangha!): No self, no problem. 
By the way, thank you for all your good creative thinking here! Statements like “the self’s purpose is to suffer” really get me to mull things over, to do research both eternally and internally. I’m a big fan of the creative approach to learning.
The purpose of choosing how to respond/react to awareness instead of having no choice but to be awareness, is to be like God and the angels, knowing good and bad.
I don’t know what happened there - but in this case, I’m trying to show that the correlation is due to necessity not causation. (nb. correlation is not an argument against causation - just that they are not synonyms)
Here I’ll try and improve on your syllogism : (which is full of stuff that is very difficult to accept)
- Suffering is the emotional pull towards good, and away from bad.
- The self is the subject that is being pulled
- Therefore self is necessary for suffering
ie. without self, suffering is just some amorphous concept, the self grounds and gives meaning to the movement. Its its role/function.
The purpose of ice cream might be to create farting dragons, but it would be nonsense to speculate about something without reason.
The emotional pull is attributed to the imagined self because the brain’s beliefs override awareness of what it is actually doing. This is because the brain is more identified with its beliefs than with self-knowledge, more confident than diffident, less interested in what may be true (the unknown) than in what it presumes to know.
This is obvious in hindsight, but without awareness of what the brain is actually doing, there’s no awakening to actuality.
Typically in this forum one would say that “thought” is doing this, and though thought is the instrument utilized, it is the emotional drive, the brain’s confidence in its deeply held beliefs, that activates thought.
I still think suffering is a result of the emotional pull, not the pull itself. But this may be simply good old-fashioned semantics. How about we call it a draw?
Suffering is the result of giving in to temptation (the emotional pull) - not temptation itself.