Yes, it is a basic desire of the self to move elsewhere. But with what tools or facilities am I meeting the fact of where and what I am now? Are the very tools I am using already pushing me in a certain direction? When I see that the motor has stopped working, I can fix it. The same sense of ‘I can fix it’ seems to be behind everything we do in the psychological field; even before we start to look there is the assumption that something is wrong.
I guess I see a range of qualia. On one end are qualia that are strongly influenced by thought, like the quale of coming home after a long time away. On the other end are qualia that are less touched (or perhaps even untouched) by thought, the quale of profound equanimity, for example.
Here again is the function of the self - in order to do its job of surviving (by aiming for security and progress) it necessarily sees in terms of good and bad.
The only tools I have seem to be my ability to interpret/name and judge (which is my function) based on my conditioning (who I am/what I know)
As long as I am, I am a good or bad entity in a good or bad place. Knowledge is Being.
Isn’t sadness a pain? Otherwise we are going to get tangled in the issue of what happens to the body and what happens to the mind. There are many forms of pain. Let’s take one single psychological pain and go into it.
Are these tools reliable? When they are related only to the motor engine, they are: it is necessary to name the components and judge their performance. But how do we actually start to name, interpret and judge something that is happening internally?
We already know that this will reveal the involvement of the psyche, thought, the past. It’s a foregone conclusion. But if we look at pain, and leave psychological and physical pain out of it, we might discover something new about the relationship between feeling, thought, and memory.
Is there non-psychological pain without thought or memory? Is there even such a thing as non-psychological, non-physical pain?
Yes - though it is the egoic I that names a particular state : equanimity, and wants to get there (thus moving further away) - whereas the universe does not know what equanimity is.
Bodily sensation is physical - there is no bodily sensation without the physical
pain is suffering - suffering is psychological - without fear there is no pain.
I’m wondering if there is feeling (pain or pleasure or whatever) whose source is neither psychological (despair), nor physical (headache), rather … I dunno … spiritual? Existential? Baked into the genetic code? Human newborns come into the world with certain likes and dislikes, yet they are years away from having a full-fledged ego.
Psychological pain is our response to thwarted desire: not getting what we want. We want company but are alone, we feel sad. We want a Maserati but drive a Chevy, we feel envious. We want members of other cultures to have the same values we have in our culture, we feel threatened. We want to live forever but grow old, we feel anger.
It hurts so much because our desires are so strong. Is there anything stronger?