Pain as a Question

 Tonight, during the group meditation practice, I continued to explore the notion of seeing everyday experiences as open inquiry. And I did this by incorporating the experience of back pain into my huatou practice. An interesting thing happened for a short time in the first sitting. I started to directly contemplate the pain and wonder 'whose pain' is it? When I sincerely wondered about it, the pain did not seem to be pain anymore at all, but an ever-changing, unfolding process and experience. I gradually felt a shift in my felt experience of pain, away from a biological model and toward a more inquiry based, existential way of viewing pain.
   What would be the difference between ''biological" and "existential" views of pain? Here, I am likely influenced by E. F Schumacher again, who warned against a modern tendency inherited from the 19th century to try to reduce higher level activities to a 'lower' rung of motivation. Freud was said to have 'reduced' human emotion to sexual and aggressive instincts (an oversimplification of Freud), while other philosophers reduce mental activities to chemical processes and the like. When I first started to meditate, I would sometimes deal with pain in precisely this way by imagining the emotion as a series of electrical impulses. I even went so far as to visualize a neuron on those longer retreats when I had felt some dull pains here and there. The effect of visualizing is to reduce pain to something somewhat more innocuous than a sharp or invading sensation. After all, who could be angry with a bundle of cells and electrical impulses? This kind of reductionism can sometimes take the edge away from painful experiences.  I refer to these approaches as 'biological'  views of pain, where sensations are somehow seen as indicative of physiological or even chemical processes rather than as unique mental events in their own right.
        And I believe that the effect of a lot of biological knowledge (such as even Darwin's notion of survival of the fittest) is to create a kind of distance around one's personal experiences, or perhaps a 'wider' perspective. It is as though in panning out of one's own suffering, one is able to have a less desperate stance toward one's own 'personal' or inner suffering. I believe that there are even stories in Buddhism which suggest that this kind of knowing is a glimpse into emptiness. I am thinking of the story of the woman who comes to the Buddha asking him to revive her dead child, only to later find that everyone in her village has suffered the loss of a relative or loved one. Such a panning out can help a person deal with suffering, because it suggests that pain isn't a personal affair, and it is shared across a whole species.
      The other approach to pain is to see it as an existential event, which I will refer to as a question. Yes, pain can be a question! Why? It's a question because at the moment that pain arises, there is something unclear and unsettled about it, similar to an unresolved question or problem. I simply cannot put a neat framework around the pain, any more than I can resolve a relationship issue using neat logic. Schumacher, again, distinguishes between convergent thinking and divergent thinking, as a way to get people to think about the differences between kinds of problems. While convergent thinking uses analysis and deductive logic to arrive at a limited answer, divergent thinking requires a process of reconciling opposites and coming to compromises. While convergent thinking seems to correspond to 'biological'  views of pain (reducing pain to a common denominator such as neurons, genes, environmental factors, etc.) divergent thinking seems to approach a more existential way of relating to things as deeply personal, often conflicted and messy to the very end.
    Seeing pain as an existential 'question' is quite interesting for a variety of reasons. First, it lifts the pressure away from trying to use a theory or technique to explain away the pain. I have found in my own meditation practice that putting a theory in front of an experience can temporarily numb emotions, but it tends not to allow a person to be really in the pain itself or to work through it. By beholding pain as a tension of opposites (the urge to flee vs. the urge to sit, relief vs. abiding in discomfort, etc.) one begins to see pain more as a continuum than as a pat and fixed experience that is always the same. This leads to my second point, which is that seeing pain as part of an existential question of being puts the pain on a level of something that is respected and beheld. I found that when this happens, the pain no longer revolts or consumes a person's awareness. It's certainly aware, but it's not so aware that it is 'in one's face'. It even combines pain with the questioning nature of mind, thus elevating pain's function to part of an overall quest for understanding and insight into one's existence.