Diane Ackerman defines pain as more a matter of culture and tradition than of physical sensation caused by nerve stimulation. She writes of the way a fakir’s flesh begins to sear and cook as he walks across hot coals and the fact that soccer players don’t feel their injuries until after the game ends. In my own experience as a shade-tree mechanic, I have often broken knuckles wide open and not realized it until I looked down and saw a line of fresh blood on the handle of the wrench.
Perception of pain is all governed by the brain, after all, and the brain is full of tricks. Well trained (or well distracted), it can make the most excruciating circumstances appear commonplace. But the brain also needs that pain–feeds on it as it feeds on all sense perceptions. The brain needs pain not just as an indicator of physical damage but as an acknowledgment of suffering. It is through suffering that we come to know how to be human. It is through suffering that we come to understand one another.
Zen Buddhism recognizes this, that the human condition is defined by suffering–indeed, that to be alive is itself to suffer. Judaism and Christianity both recognize this in the story of The Fall: the Judeo-Christian foundation story is the story of how our partaking of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil leads us into sin (ie. suffering). The fruit is not of knowledge simply, but of the knowledge of good and evil. Knowledge is not to blame, but rather the awareness of being favored or wronged, the ability to discern good and evil, is what both makes us “like God” and causes our most basic transgression. It is the foundational myth because it defines human nature: our sin causes us to toil, and to toil is to suffer.
This myth, like all creation stories, is descriptive: it tells us who we are in relation to the rest of the world. In the case of the Judeo-Christian foundation story, then, we humans may be defined as those who suffer.
Suffering is at the heart of the Torah, a vein that courses with the spiritual blood of the people of Israel. No people have learned or created more from their pain. The tragedies of the Jews have helped us see how suffering makes us, in the end, not less human, but more noble, more, if you will, like God.
This is echoed in the early Christian experience in the symbolism of the Crucifixion and the scene of suffering as re-visioned as the Resurrection. Unlike the Genesis story, which described the human condition, the Resurrection describes the human capacity for re-creation, for the healing that suffering implies. In this it reflects all mythologies of death and re-creation, from the Phoenix to Persephone. Sadly, too many of those who call themselves Christian don’t understand the symbolic importance of this and instead get bogged down in idiotic squabbles over the scene’s veracity. It is simply unimportant that we should or should not live like Jesus–at least not literally, for that would be suicide–but that we do already: we die and are reborn through bouts of physical pain, depression, anger, even the normal cycles of sleeping and wakefulness. If we recognize this in one another, Christians should preach, we will be more likely to practice forgiveness.
Buddhism, likewise, echoes death and rebirth through the life-cycles moving toward Nirvana. But it recognizes the more immediate cycles of suffering through meditation. The breath draws in suffering and draws out inter-being. Through mindfulness we heal the schism of our isolation as individual beings. Sin, thought Paul Tillich, is separation. It is the suffering of being apart, of being unable to understand our pain as anything other than that which is inflicted upon us by evil, by accident, by the inexorable forces of an indifferent world.
Since culture is the tool we use to interact with others and our environment, it has a role to play in the creation and the regulation of suffering. Rather than being a set of controlling metaphors that debate how we live, culture, when it is functioning, reflects that delicate interplay between pain as individual experience and suffering as a means of understanding. When the traditions through which we worship and play, through which we practice fellowship and build and destroy are working well, they determine not only when we feel pain but define the instruments through which we breach the dam between the spirit and the blood.