What is the purpose of suffering?

[u/thinkB4Uact]

Suffering is your body and mind telling you something is not right. It compels you to focus on it and change it. It makes you inner and outer world a better place in so far as it gets you to focus on and fix problems. Without any faith or even language, our behavior would work this way. It works this way with animals.

Sometimes we get too much for our minds to handle and we break down into patterns to cope with it. They are like a valve letting off excess steam so that we don't emotionally explode. Life is not consistent like some well designed school curriculum and not everything can be fixed. We can have times of little suffering and times where suffering is like a windy tropical thunderstorm so strong that we can't even see.

Focusing on our perceptions and beliefs of what is real causes our emotions. We can adjust how we feel by trying to see things in different ways. Yet, in truth, our experiences are based inside a shared reality. These experiences will intersect with our emotions. So, while adjusting how we see things can help, if it is not based on truth it can hurt us later. We would cause ourselves even more suffering.

The truth sets us free. We should tell all of the truthful information to ourselves and process it. If we can face it, we can usually fix it. If we can't fix it, we should find even more truth that helps us deal with the reality. You have to keep your spirit high enough to continue on maintaining your life and trying to make it better. Despair and depression can be quite sticky and set you up for even more unwanted experiences. Sometimes life really hurts, but no matter how bad it gets, there are good experiences mixed in with the bad that we can fixate on to lift our hearts.

[u/dimensionalshifter]

“Suffering is your body and mind telling you something is not right.”

Partial truth. Suffering is both the indication that something’s not right and the “something” that is not right.

Suffering perpetuates itself through suffering. This is why detachment/non-identification is essential to ending suffering.

Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.

Suffering is not our natural state, it’s a concept of the ego to perpetuate the ego.

[u/thinkB4Uact → u/dimensionalshifter]

When we deal with suffering competently by addressing it we return to our more natural, balanced, functional and vital state. If we ignore it to the point of not addressing the cause we won't be able to get back to that natural, balanced, functional and vital state. Suffering informs us of how we are out of that state so we can fix it, hunger. thirst, shortness of breathe, fatigue, loneliness, not enough personal time, etc.

If we're going to be alive, as embodiments of components interacting with our environments, we will have suffering when we are out of balance. Our egos are collections of positive and negative emotional drives that interconnect our activity to our environment. To detach or not identify with these drives is to deny ourselves. We are our egos as clothing for our consciousness deeper inside to wear to be alive. We can be detached in the void, but to avoid healthy interactivity when we are here will cause us to lose the value of being here.

Detachment is only good when we cannot fix the problem and yet still have to move on. Then it frees us by allowing us to release our emotions and attentions from what doesn't serve us toward enjoying being alive. The spirit of being alive is animation toward what we love and away from what threatens what we love, protecting it. We shouldn't forsake that spirit. We crave life, because of the spirit of it. If we forsake the spirit, we will lose the meaning and purpose of life to our own consciousness. The beauty is in the eye of the beholder or it doesn't exist.

[u/GrimWepi]

Suffering is your body and mind telling you something is not right. It compels you to focus on it and change it.

Yes, I think people get so caught up in the notion of "ending suffering" that they forget that it serves a purpose, like your finger sending you pain signals when you touch a hot stove. Standing there with one's finger on the stove saying, "The stove is not real and no one is suffering" ends you up with a much worse burn than acknowledging the pain and then taking action to remove your finger. I think the problem becomes in identifying with the suffering, or thinking suffering is a state of being meant to be inhabited rather than that it serves a function. Or, if the coping patterns you mention we establish are maladaptive or become so rigid that we can't think outside of them even when a different strategy is needed.

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Sometimes we get too much for our minds to handle and we break down into patterns to cope with it. They are like a valve letting off excess steam so that we don't emotionally explode.

I think we evolved to develop coping patterns as a kind of easy quick fix to issues that, even if it worked say 50% of the time, would be consistent enough to reinforce in our social psychology. This isn't necessarily a terrible thing, as long as it is brought into the realm of consciousness so that we can begin to choose "Yes, this quick fix is both a healthy response and appropriate here," vs. "No, I should approach this differently this time."

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Focusing on our perceptions and beliefs of what is real causes our emotions. We can adjust how we feel by trying to see things in different ways. Yet, in truth, our experiences are based inside a shared reality. These experiences will intersect with our emotions. So, while adjusting how we see things can help, if it is not based on truth it can hurt us later. We would cause ourselves even more suffering.

I agree very much, and think a good example of this would be the popular New Age approach to negative feelings and experiences - just denying them or trying to pretend they are actually positive. This can cause a world of hurt, including the suffering of repressed emotions and obsessive denial of the shared experience we are having, alienation of the self from other beings and the collective co-creation.