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Suffering and Intractable Pain
Joshmaher10

I get your thought process here but disagree with your assumption about the equality of experience. They're certainly not similar physical sensations that can arbitrarily be grouped. Acute and chronic physical pain sensations behave much differently in humans. If we're talking hunger, it may be acutely painful but it's chronically lethal. Those monks who starve to death in meditation are not having the same experience as  mediators on the Calm app trying to be okay with fasting until lunch. 

You'll have a much different experience and your body wi... (read more)

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Suffering and Intractable Pain
Joshmaher10

Interesting perspective, thank you for sharing your thoughts here. I'm curious how you view the similarities between temporarily going hungry and experiencing the intractable pain of hunger versus experiencing the physical sensation of intractable pain from nerve damage for years or decades. It seems to me these are two very different things that are being grouped arbitrarily. Abiding may help with the former but doesn't seem to for the latter.

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2Gordon Seidoh Worley
Let's suppose that that you experience the same level of pain from being hungry and from nerve damage. What's different about these? Moment to moment, not much really. The main difference is that you expect to be able to alleviate the hunger pain but not the nerve pain, and in fact since the hunger pain is temporary, as you say, then it will in fact eventually go away. So I don't really see much difference here other than that it's actually much easier to never learn to live with hunger because you have a way to address it (eat some food) whereas with the nerve pain your only option may be to learn to abide it, so if anything such a strategy is more likely to be useful for nerve pain not less.