What is the self? Is it the brain? Soul? Something else - something that hard to say much about? Some combination?
We will sidestep that. This conversation is about information and perception. Suffering is associated with painful perceptions and painful information. Can all that be changed before it reaches your self, your awareness?
Suppose you think it is wrong how people think and speak about suffering as though it were weather. "Something arrives from outside, strikes consciousness, and leaves its mark. Pain happens to me. Grief happens to me. Fear happens to me."
Is it wrong? So what? That we all do it so much is interesting. Some argue that perceptions that are hard to shift like that and seem to be a genetic bias may be assumed true. It is as if nature is trying to tell us something.
Suffering seems to come from some external force. That is how we think of it and that is how it acts.
How does it reach the self? Experience? How does it get "in"? How does it become part of me?
No matter how this happens, it acts like a stronger force, an invader. We all see it that way and it also makes us see it that way. That is why our nature is in some sense an enemy.
Is my mind set up to create a mirror of it? Perhaps it does not really get in but as I am programmed to think I should respond in pain and degradation, I make that happen.
So it is how I respond to the attack that hurts me not the actual attack.
If it really does get in then what? Suffering needs a sufferer. It is a strange idea if suffering is out there even if it gets into nobody. It would be essentially something like a demon.
If my experience of suffering in some way is me - that is calling me partly bad for suffering.
Arguments that suffering can fit into a good divine purpose fail if human nature is itself the problem. Human nature often blames the person for their own suffering - even if choice is not directly involved. The alcoholic can no longer fix his liver disease and alcoholism is an illness - yet our compassion will be lacking. We blame his nature so we effectively blame him.
Also, if suffering gets "in" and becomes incarnate in a person - can we suggest that God might be arranging that or even sending it in? Perhaps! It is dishonest for no faith to encourage allow people to think that.
SOUL
If I am a spiritual soul, have no parts or material components, then how can I feel suffering? How does it reach into my core then? The soul doctrine seems to imply that the soul reasons, "I should suffer as something is attacking me. But it cannot really attack me so I act as if it did. I rouse suffering in response to the attack as if the attack did it."
SUFFERING IS INFORMATION
If joy, compassion, suffering - you name it - is event entering consciousness from elsewhere or outside then what? You can, in principle anyway if not in practice, advertently or inadvertently alter the information so that the self reads it as something else. The problem is that the mind would be making the suffering to mirror the suffering it thinks is attacking it from outside.
Suppose it is somehow woven into the structure of the self itself. Not an intruder but a constituent element. Not merely detected by me, but partly identical with what I am. Then it is argued that it is real. My suffering is somehow me. Am I letting it do this?
The information can go through many different processes. Suppose the information reaches the brain. Then it goes to something else. It goes to your deepest self which you are probably not conscious of - we know that the self is more than awareness. By the time it gets to you, the real you, you could receive it in a very altered way.
Big claims need big evidence. There is no strong evidence for or against the following. If I suffer, my mind is creating it. If it is creating it, it is also potentially shaping it. Thus you never know if the terrible suffering you experience that seems to victimise you, is really that bad or if you are really the victim you feel you are.
THE HYPOTHETICAL
If I can reshape suffering so that it is less painful and demeaning should I?
We will aside the fact that you would if the suffering were terrible enough. That is certain. Deep down we are not the moral creatures we pretend to be.
So should I?
If suffering is outside me then taking it away does not make me less me. But if it belongs to me as in being part of my identity, taking it away does make me less me. One thing I would be is a sufferer and a potential sufferer.
Many feel that deep attachment, longing, empathy, beauty and even love may
depend upon the mind’s capacity to suffer and its experience of suffering.
They say that this is not because suffering is good in some simplistic sense,
but because finitude and vulnerability shape awareness from within. A
being incapable of suffering is arguably incapable of certain forms of
significance. Love matters partly because loss is possible. Courage
matters because fear exists internally rather than merely conceptually.
Compassion matters because another’s pain resonates with structures already
present in oneself. Even joy may derive some of its intensity from contrast
against fragility and deprivation. A consciousness without the possibility of
suffering could become flat not because it lacks pleasure, but because nothing
is existentially at stake.
And yet suffering also appears tyrannical.
It can dominate perception so completely that avoidance becomes the sum of
your existence. Much of human life becomes organized around escape:
escape from humiliation, loneliness, anxiety, mortality, uncertainty. In that
condition suffering makes you a prisoner and treats you as less than a person.
A useful analogy might be fire. Suffering like fire burns consciousness and is destructive to who you are. But under different conditions fire also illuminates, warms, transforms metal, creates motion. The same force changes meaning depending on its integration into a larger system.
This assumes that suffering is an outside force and circumstances decree if it will help or hinder or both. The analogy is terrible and makes one a victim of circumstances. The alternative blames you if suffering destroys you. Either way there no win.
Notice how the above asserts that suffering can be source of growth or destruction. If I am the one that decides what it will be then I am stronger than it. But that makes no sense. It grips me and won't just go away so I am hardly the stronger one. People might opt for saying I am a willing victim and see it. I am just the dog that learns to cope when my cage gets smaller. The strength in the dog is nothing compared to the power of the cage. What would I need suffering for to grow if my choice in the face of suffering is the cause of growth not the suffering?
Whether a being controls the whole universe or just a few square feet in a cage, that being is still being a God as it were. Control is control. It does not matter how much of it you have as long as you accept what you have. The growth is suspect for that reason for power is at the root of the human spirit.
Back to the analogy. Either way, the danger of tyranny is still there. You may know there is a risk but you never know exactly what the risk is or how dreadful it will be.
We are told that, "If suffering is too easily or too thoroughly converted into joy, one risks dissolving important distinctions. Pain reveals injustice, limitation, mortality. If every inner wound becomes nothing or automatically blissful, consciousness may lose contact with truths that suffering evolved to disclose. So perhaps the deepest freedom would not be eliminating suffering from the self, nor seeking it, but accepting it and finding a way to integrate it without letting it demean or damage you further. If it harms your life, it cannot take away your core which reaches out in goodness to others."
That does not tell us if the good things are enough to warrant us being this vulnerable. It approaches toxic positivity.
Is there true compassion in this: "It is good that I cannot rewire suffering or at least surround it with good things so that it impacts less - all the time. It is good for it gives me a sense of compassion and justice"? To argue that morality should arrest suffering and then say that is telling.
Imagine now you have the right and power to reshape how your child may deal with suffering...
Undeniably you will reshape.
CONCLUSIONS
Big claims need big evidence. There is no strong evidence against the possibility that, when faced with an apparent external attack, human nature itself generates or amplifies the suffering it experiences. Just because a grievous insult or painful event occurs does not prove that the self must feel corresponding pain; the fact that suffering follows an event does not mean the event caused it in the way we commonly assume. Our minds may be wired, in ways we do not fully understand, to mirror, intensify, or even fabricate hurt in response to perceived threats, making the self a chief creator or co-creator of its own suffering. The correlation between external stimuli and internal pain tells us nothing about necessity or inevitability, and until there is strong evidence to the contrary, we cannot dismiss the hypothesis that much of human suffering arises not from the attack itself, but from the internal mechanics of the self interpreting and amplifying it.
Also, if we could make ourselves see an attack as a source of joy the evidence that we should not is thin.
To say suffering is needed is a very big claim. It needs proof or strong evidence. That is lacking. There is a failure in compassion when one suggests that suffering should in some sense happen.
In practice, it may not matter about the following. It whether suffering is literally rewired into joy. Or if is really perceived as suffering but transformed through meaning, control, adaptation, or masochistic desire.
The crucial point is that the supposedly absolute principle “suffering is bad and evil is meaningless if it is not” begins to collapse once suffering can be altered in its significance or felt quality. If a person can experience pain as rewarding, meaningful, empowering, spiritually purifying, or even pleasurable, then suffering no longer carries an inherently negative status that is fixed in all circumstances. Whether this change occurs through neurological rewiring, psychological reinterpretation, voluntary embrace, or emotional conditioning makes little difference to the philosophical result. The fact that suffering can lose its negative force, or even become sought after, suggests that its badness is not an intrinsic and undeniable property but something dependent on consciousness, context, valuation, and response. Once suffering can be welcomed, neutralized, transcended, or enjoyed, the simple claim that suffering is always and necessarily evil becomes far harder to defend.
BOTTOM LINE: Your opposition to suffering/evil says more about you than it
does them.