wCHAP.12

(9/8/98)

CHAPTER XII

THE MEANING OF PAIN

Chapter XXIV describes the Buddhist view of pain; i.e., that the goal of life is to transcend pain by detaching from self. I discard the foregoing approach and say that pain is not something to totally put aside, but rather to deal with in many different ways.

This Chapter presents various ideas on some of those ways. However, this is only a small step in dealing with the issue of pain as it relates to a Science of Religion and a Religion of Wisdom. The below material draws from a broadly focused, well-thought-through reference source [1] that can serve as a foundation from which to tackle pain and meaning of life.

Modern thinkers tend to talk about happiness and satisfaction when they discuss what life is all about. Pain is seldom mentioned. They think pain interferes with happiness so can be ignored. I do not believe that a Science of Religion or a Religion of Wisdom can become an adequate world view unless it is able to deal effectively with the issue of pain. I am dealing with meaning of life not happiness or satisfaction, and think pain is critical in clarifying the difference.

"This book tells a...story. It describes how the experience of pain is decisively shaped or modified by individual human minds and by specific human cultures."(p. 1) [1]

RESPONSE: Interestingly enough, Morris never discusses the Buddhist approach to pain which would have seemed to be a valuable thing to include.

"It is the neglected encounter between pain and meaning that lies at the center of this book...."(p. 3)

RESPONSE: And it is just this issue that is of primary importance to a Religion of Wisdom.

"When we recognize that the experience of pain is not timeless but changing, the product of specific periods and particular cultures, we may also recognize we can act to change or influence our own futures."(p. 4)

RESPONSE: And focusing on how we can act and how we should act is a lesson that needs to be plainly and clearly laid out.

"...the Myth of Two Pains. We live in an era when many people believe -- as a basic, unexamined foundation of thought -- that pain comes divided into separate types: physical and mental."(p. 9)

p. 14: "We learn how to feel pain and learn what it means."

p. 18: "It seems we cannot simply suffer pain but almost always are compelled to make sense of it."

p. 19: "When we fall into pain, we also fall into a net of already constructed meanings."

RESPONSE: It appears to me that the above message is that pain is like everything else. As a result of seeing and hearing we learn to "make sense" of what we see and what we hear. Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy forces one to realize that feelings come not from the stimulus, but from our interpretations of those stimuli. These things are part of the practical application of HBAURS (Human Beings Are the Ultimate Reference System). Because these ideas are not automatically part of our thinking, they must be learned. Therefore, it is critical that a Wise Community has effective ways to ensure that this teaching takes place.

p. 20: "Pain...is far more than simply or exclusively a medical problem....The experience of pain is also shaped by such powerful cultural forces as gender, religion, and social class. It is reinforced -- and sometimes created -- by psychological and emotional states such as guilt, fear, anger, grief, and depression. Further, pain is not always an unmitigated disaster. We willingly, if grudgingly, accept pain that accompanies growth or achievement."

RESPONSE: A congruent educational process should help students understand and integrate pain into their life. It would help them recognize the many aspects of pain, and provide better models of pain. It must provide better ways to experience pain, and interpret what it means.

p. 21: "...pain remains one of the most perplexing mysteries of our time. There is no authority today who can tell us exactly what pain is and how it works. Pain thus plunges us instantly into the midst of controversy and the unknown."

RESPONSE: Though the answer may be tentative, a Science of Religion must provide some guidance in this area. These answers can be improved as we learn more and see better ways to put the issues together. Each person's life is rich with data to draw from in order to synthesize better answers.

MEDICINE & PAIN

p. 282: "'To allow a patient to experience unbearable pain or suffering is unethical medical practice.'"

p. 191: For physicians "...not relieving pain brushes dangerously close to the act of willfully inflicting it."

p. 22: "The odds of hospital addiction [to morphine and other narcotic painkillers] are less than 1 percent."

p. 244: "It seems preposterous to argue that medicine in general takes almost no account of human suffering. Yet Eric J. Cassell, a physician who has written extensively in the field of medical ethics, makes exactly this argument in an important essay entitled, THE NATURE OF SUFFERING AND THE GOAL OF MEDICINE (1982)."

RESPONSE: The goals of current medicine are as poorly focused as all other areas of society. Therefore, it should come as no surprise if they are deficient in many areas. The primary goal of all human activity should be to achieve a SFLIHM (a Sustainable Feeling that one's LIfe Has Meaning) for oneself and to work for the conditions that allow every one else to achieve this state. Until medicine incorporates this goal into its practices many things will be done that keep it from using its knowledge and resources to best advantage to help people in the way they need to be helped.

.....end of medicine and pain.....

PAIN AND TRANSCENDENCE

p. 25: "Pain takes us out of our normal modes for dealing with the world."

p. 77: "Pain partakes of [the] eerie and sometimes appalling power to drain off everything that gives the world vividness, color, coherence, and value."

p. 125: "While we remain in normal health, we often tend (like Tolstoy's Ivan Ilych) [2] to fix our gaze on the horizon of worldly goods, as if the world ended at the horizon....pain serves as a bridge between worlds. It has sometimes provided access to vision so alien from our normal consciousness that it can only be called prophetic, utopian, or revolutionary."

p. 135: "Modern pain, of course, normally chains us down to the material world....In providing release into a pure communion with the divine, [pain for the visionary] becomes not something to be cured or even endured but rather a means of knowledge. Offering access to an otherwise inaccessible understanding."

RESPONSE: The dimension of pain leading to transcendence seems to be the area where a Science of Religion and a Religion of Wisdom have one of their greatest challenges. If nothing human is alien to our concern, then pain as a universal human experience of great import seems worthy of serious consideration.

If pain does indeed have the potential to move one toward a "transcendent" state then a Science of Religion should become intimately familiar with this process. A model for pain congruent with the values of a Religion of Wisdom seems essential to develop. This model should help persons move toward their own best self rather than to cave-in and accept limiting models that divert them into mastering pain (such as the self abuse of Christian martyrs), but not to master the challenge of living.

....end of pain and transcendence....

p. 29: "We experience pain only and entirely as we interpret it."

p. 34: "Pain, whatever else philosophy or biomedical science can tell us about it, is almost always the occasion for an encounter with meaning."

p. 38: "History can offer us almost unlimited examples to illustrate the idea that pain is not just a biological fact but an experience in search of an interpretation."

p. 45: "...pain is not just blindly felt or unreflectively endured as a series of biochemical impulses. It changes with its place in human history....we experience our pain as it is interpreted...whether theological, economic, scientific, or psychological. We make sense of pain in much the same way we make sense of the world....Pain can reorder priorities in a hurry. It can show us what truly matters."

p. 52: "Mark Zborowski in 1969 published a fascinating book entitled PEOPLE IN PAIN."

"As Zborowski concluded, 'People responded to their pain not only as individuals, but also as Italians, Jews, Negroes, or Nordics.'"

p. 69/70: "Acute pain...[protects] us from further harm."

"Chronic pain...possesses no biological purpose."

RESPONSE: Perhaps, the "purpose" of chronic pain has evolutionary significance. This purpose may be primarily social. If there is to be a society, individuals must be genetically programmed (by natural selection) to move in the direction of maintaining that society. Pain by forcing us to look beyond pleasure and immediate gratification may perform a role necessary to the perpetuation of the species. It forces us to mature, to look beyond short-term pleasure (selfishness) to see a broader vision for our life. Perhaps, chronic pain must be interpreted within that kind of evolutionary context.

p. 72: "The truth is that we learn almost everything we know about pain, including the need to deny it and to smother it in silence."

"As soon as we are born, we are educated day and night in the school of pain. But it is mostly acute pain that we learn about. No one teaches us what to do with a pain that never stops."

p. 73: "Pain makes most of us irritable and cranky."

"Prolonged chronic pain threatens to unravel the self."

p. 74: "The pain clinic stands as an innovative, revolutionary way of thinking about our oldest and most implacable foe [pain]."

"From the time of the ancient Hippocratic writings, pain has held the clear and secure status of a symptom."

With chronic pain "...the message is the illness."

Pain clinics treat pain as a diagnosis, not a symptom. "[This]...is not just a new thought but the basis for an entirely new way of thinking."

p. 75: "There are now close to one thousand private and public pain treatment centers in the United States alone. In 1960 there were no more than a handful."

"Many of the best pain clinics...accept the bold thinking that redefines pain not as a sensation but a perception....Perception...requires minds and emotions as well as nerves. When we understand pain as a perception, we are implicitly challenging the deeply entrenched mechanistic tradition in medicine that treats us as divided into separate and uncommunicating blocks called body and mind."

p. 237: "One modern treatment center advises its staff frankly that pain is 'anything that the patient says it is.'"

p. 85: PAIN & COMEDY: "...there are really two major traditions that bear on our understanding of comic pain. Those opposed traditions descend from the two great philosophical antagonists of antiquity, Plato and Aristotle. From Aristotle, we derive the dominant tradition that associates comedy with pure pleasure. From Plato we derive the competing and normally unacknowledged tradition that associates comedy with the mixture of pleasure and pain."

p. 104: "Hysteria, both ancient and modern, provides important evidence that pain is constructed as much by social conditions as by the structure of the nervous system."

p. 112: "Hysteria....was...a woman's pain....This question owed much to the specific changes in nineteenth-century medicine....Aristotle... classified pain as an emotion."

p. 174: "The traditional medical reading that derives all pain from organic lesions and tissue damage not only leads to unnecessary surgery and misdiagnosis but also has helped to create and to sustain our contemporary (shrunken) understanding of pain as no more than a problem in biochemistry."

p. 175: "We use pain almost as regularly -- and sometimes as cunningly -- as pain uses us. The hope lies in learning how to use it to better purpose."

p. 180: "Almost every culture includes rites and ordeals of initiation that mark the passage into adulthood, and pain constitutes one of the most important features of these varied rites."

"[Anthropologist Alan] Morinis convincingly argues that such ritually inflicted pain serves as a cultural mechanism for inducing and signaling a transformation of consciousness."

p. 182: "Pain has always served -- and continues to serve -- specific social and ethical purposes. Indeed, as a species we show an endless ingenuity for discovering new uses for pain within the recurring structures of formal and informal rites."

p. 184: Franz Kafka's story, IN THE PENAL COLONY, "serves to strip the civilized disguises off from pain: Pain, we might say, is the universal instrument of force....Without the state-sponsored machinery of secret police...and the ever-present threat of pain and death, most tyrannies would dissolve overnight."

RESPONSE: Sadly enough Western democracies are also based on the belief that civilization, civil order, and culture would likewise disappear without such punishment and pain in childhood and the threat of such things including state executions to keep people "on the right track." There is an active minority, at least in the U.S. if not in Europe, who feel that society's existence requires threats and use of pain and death to protect itself from being destroyed.

This "ever-present threat of pain and death" is well represented on every police force in virtually every city in the U.S. The police regularly "beat the hell" out of anyone who doesn't display sufficient respect and cooperation. Physical punishment is so widely accepted by police officials, public officials, courts, etc. that those so abused almost never consider it even worth complaining. The use of beatings, threats, and even killing by police doesn't happen because the officer is out of touch with our society's values, but just the opposite. They know very well society's values and what they are being paid to do.

Isolation is a big part of the foregoing process. Just six cops and the citizen on a country road, or alone in the police car, or at the jail or prison. Jails and prisons are carefully designed to ensure the isolation of the individual. The guard or guards can seclude the individual in almost any way they want and do whatever they please. There is essentially no recourse. No prying eyes to see in the night or in the corners of a stone mansion with steel bars, and locked doors at every turn.

But part of this infliction of pain comes out of frustration. Because we have set up a social system and a criminal justice system that brutalizes citizens we often produce individuals who do not love their fellow humans. Rather they exploit, rob, rape, and in general brutalize other people at every opportunity. Police hired to enforce the law are frustrated that such persons frequently "get away with murder," because there is insufficient evidence to convict them and they "thumb their nose" at the police, courts, and everyone else.

Just as many parents spank their children when the child hits another child (with the idea to teach them -- by hitting them --that hitting is wrong), police share the same thinking. If some juvenile delinquent, or adult delinquent does not honor the law they will "beat the hell out of them" (itself an illegal act) to teach them to respect the law!

We know it is not easy to work with someone who has been brutalized and help them become a loving, nurturing human being. But it can be done and a Science of Religion must help us to find ways to do it effectively and consistently. I think Dr. Hank Giarretto's model (see Chapter XXIII) is a big step in the right direction.

p. 193: Ernest Hemingway to Scott Fitzgerald: "'When you get the dammed hurt use it' -- suggests that we can sometimes invent truly creative uses for an unavoidable pain. Pain in this sense may serve as the raw material of personal and artistic triumph."

p. 194: "...the astonishing performances we witness almost daily in athletics occur only because the athlete has learned how to compete in pain. In professional sport, pain is in some sense the unchosen but inevitable medium of performance."

"Dancers, like athletes....[pay] an unavoidable price [which]...is, of course, pain."

p. 195: "Dancers sometimes speak of riding into their pain, as if it were a source of energy they could tap....In a very practical sense, the dancer must accept pain, come to terms with it, and the dancer's use of pain thus lies in this willing acceptance....Perhaps the dancer's simultaneous acceptance and forgetfulness of pain offers a useful model. The art would be in discovering how to avoid merely stiff, passive resistance and how to use pain as the medium for a fluid, creative performance, even if the performance were limited to walking downstairs for dinner or climbing behind the wheel of the car."

"The distance between accepting pain and seeking pain is immense.... Artists...who have struggled with various demons, from alcohol and epilepsy to tuberculosis and insanity, do not demonstrate that pain provides the indispensable and eternal source of art but rather that the creative, transforming power of art can put anything to use, even pain."

RESPONSE: Although the author mentions that "The distance between accepting pain and seeking pain is immense," he doesn't go deeper into this issue. It seems to me the issue of pain sensitivity is very relevant and deserves to be introduced into the discussion. Some of this research is mentioned in Dr. James Prescott's article ("Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence," in Chapter IV). There Dr. Prescott discusses studies indicating that persons denied physical affection as infants do not experience pain in the same way as those who as infants did receive physical affection.

It's hard to know how to factor in the foregoing issue. The deprived individual tends to seek pain rather than merely accepting the pain that comes along and making the best use possible of the situation. However, the issue probably is complex with many factors including the degree of deprivation, etc. My guess is that if one looks to areas such as athletics, etc. we would find that many of these individuals are grossly insensitive to pain for reasons that would not make them good models to attempt to emulate. However, the basic idea of studying how performers, athletes, etc. deal with pain seems definitely worth further exploration.

p. 198: "...the person in pain may well experience a world from which beauty, like everything else that makes life valuable, seems simply drained away. Yet the history of cultural change contains few stranger revelations than the persistence with which humankind links affliction with beauty."

"Pain as a psychosocial creation is, as I have argued, something we experience not simply as private individuals but also as members of a culture or subculture. We therefore experience pain in ways shaped and reinforced by the images current around us. Family, friends, and community -- in their behavior and values -- supply the major presentations of pain that shape our experience. Children at an early age begin to encounter images of pain in nursery rhymes, bedtime stories, and television cartoons. As we grow older, newspapers, novels, and films continue our education in pain. The advertising industry, with its unprecedented resources and power, may rank today as the most important force that shapes the ways in which we understand pain....Cultural changes...help to create significant changes in our personal experiences."

p. 199: "Even without our knowing it, ideas of beauty hold a significant influence on the ways we come to experience pain."

p. 202: "Pliny the Elder called the Laocoon[3] greater than any other work in painting or sculpture. Is such a terrifying scene, however, really an example of beauty? The question reveals the effects of a massive cultural change that separates us from the ancient Greeks. Beauty in Greek art is a matter of proportion, simplicity, and ideal form."

p. 208: "She dwells with Beauty -- Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips"

"Beauty in its transience proves inseparable from death, just as pleasure (caught in this tangle of death and beauty) turns the very act of enjoyment into pain. The lover is melancholy not in the sense of being depressed but in the sense of feeling consumed by a passion for beautiful impermanence."

"Havelock Ellis (1897-1928) in his classic and exhaustive STUDIES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SEX posed two weighty questions that concern us here. 'Why is it that love inflicts, and even seeks to inflict, pain?' he asks. 'Why is it that love suffers pain, and even seeks to suffer it?' Ellis traces the pain of love through primitive courtship rituals (where brides are chased, captured, and sometimes beaten) to such curious expressions of civilized passion as flagellation, sadism, and love bites. After a lengthy and learned review of the evidence, he concludes 'Pain acts as a sexual stimulant because it is the most powerful of all methods for arousing emotion.'"

p. 208: "Keats in a well-known letter opposing the traditional view of life as a vale of tears referred to human existence as a 'vale of Soul-making.' 'Do you not see,' he writes, 'how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways?' Pain in this Romantic view, is not an accidental property of human life but its essential and necessary core."

RESPONSE: Re: Vale of tears. Perhaps, looking at this from the other side would make more sense from the perspective of a Science of Religion and a Religion of Wisdom. Let us examine the perspective shared by most modern thinkers: the goal in life is to be happy. Keats would say, No. He says we need pain and trouble to help us achieve our highest goal. To what degree is this true?

If food, sex, comfort -- the easy life -- bring pleasure and happiness, is there anything wrong with the foregoing lifestyle? Probably not, the modern thinker would have to say. If "the easy life" really satisfies all of one's needs and leaves one fulfilled then that is the life for you.

However, there is good reason to believe that many people yearn for more. The Hindu religion presents some interesting ideas that relate to this issue. (See Chapter XXIV,, "What We Can Learn from the Study of Buddhism and Hinduism.") Hindus believe that individuals go through four different stages in their life. These are called desires: 1). Desire for Pleasure. 2). Desire for Success. 3). Desire to provide Service. 4). Renunciation of the foregoing desires and desire to achieve a Spiritual state.

Although one might question whether the Hindus have captured a universal progression of human development, it certainly focuses on the issue in a way worth exploring in more depth.

p. 210: "In mourning, [Sigmund Freud in his essay Mourning and Melancholia, 1917] wrote, we grieve for the loss of an explicit object, as in the death of a child, wife, husband, or lover. In melancholy, by contrast, we grieve without exactly understanding why. The object of loss remains unknown."

RESPONSE: Perhaps, one grieves for their wasted life. I would say they are lacking the elements that provide SFLIHM. Or, more likely they don't even recognize the value of SFLIHM as a goal. So they suffer from the absence. Probably, they also have many erroneous ideas, and self-defeating behaviors that get in the way of moving toward a SFLIHM.

p. 211: "...[The] Romantic movement in Germany, France, and England... [established the paradigm of the artist as one] who experiences the life of art -- at least at its highest moments -- as ecstatic suffering. What needs emphasis is that Goethe's portrait of the 'failed' artist as a young man immersed in nameless bliss and pain would have struck neoclassical writers as absurd. The cultural change signaled by the sorrows of Werther[4] turned out to be so influential and lasting that today it takes special courage for an artist to reject the paradigm of suffering...."

p. 213: "The outcast's pain so central to sentimental art not only conferred a new humanity on such marginal, dehumanized figures as chimney sweeps, prostitutes, and factory hands but also nourished a passion for reform whose effects reach far beyond the genteel tears inspired by a tale of distress."

"...sentimental feeling -- with its inseparable union of beauty and pain -- helped to reshape the modern world. Its shape, of course, is changing again right now with our own changing relations to beauty and pain."

p. 214: "In 1757 the young Edmund Burke -- famous later as a prominent British statesperson and political theorist -- published an epoch-making book entitled A PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRY INTO THE ORIGINS OF OUR IDEAS OF THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL. Western ideas about beauty would never quite recover."

"...he rearranges all of art and nature into two separate and opposite categories: the sublime and the beautiful. The beautiful he associates exclusively with pleasure -- and the sublime exclusively with pain."

p. 216: "Beauty in the world after Burke's PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRY stands completely stripped of any moral, cognitive, or spiritual power."

"We should doubtless regard Burke more as a symptom than cause of the vast cultural transformation of beauty that has accelerated since he wrote."

"We should expect...that a serious postmodern rehabilitation of the beautiful would necessarily work against the grain of Burkian ideas. It will inevitably oppose the heritage that divides beauty from truth, virtue, wisdom, and -- not incidently -- from pain."

p. 217: "The inventors of modernism...declared in effect that beauty was dead as a subject of art."

RESPONSE: Can a Science of Religion and a Religion of Wisdom rehabilitate beauty? Is there some interpretation of beauty that logically comes out of the basic ideas of a Science of Religion? Does the foregoing perspective instill beauty with any moral, cognitive, or spiritual power?

It would seem to me that beauty should be a key part of a Religion of Wisdom. Truth and beauty can only realistically exist together. If virtue means striving for the ideal in the realm of values then how can it be divorced from beauty? Wisdom without beauty seems hardly worth having. But how do beauty and pain relate?

I, personally, resonate with ancient Greek art in a way that modern art has never moved me. Perhaps, it is the dimension of beauty that is the critical point here. It would seem that beauty from the perspective of a Science of Religion should be more than just re-doing Greek art. But showing how the foregoing could be done probably will require artists who not only have a vision of beauty, but who have achieved a SFLIHM.

p. 219: "Perception is the key. What constitutes beauty for [surgeon, writer, faculty member of Yale Medical School, Richard] Selzer is not external symmetry, proportion or ideal form ('some quality in bodies,' as Burke puts it) but rather an internal act of understanding."

"Pain, we might say, confers or reveals a beauty we ordinarily cannot see, feel, or understand. It is a beauty that has somehow recovered its ancient alliance with truth."

p. 222/23: "We live either wholly inside or wholly outside [pain's] domain....'Never mind...we shall know it in our time.' At such a difficult, bitter moment, when we are at last fully conversant in this archaic language, Selzer would suggest that we will also come into full understanding of the intimate, unseen connection that binds pain to truth and beauty."

RESPONSE: Focusing on "an internal act of understanding" is certainly an essential part of providing a meaning for beauty or anything else for that matter within the context of a Science of Religion and a Religion of Wisdom. Since the Wise Community made up of Wise Persons is our most basic goal, beauty must somehow speak to the many diverse aspects of this issue. It must be more than things like the paintings of "Hard Working Farmer with His Tractor" promoted by Communism.

p. 225: "...[Marquis de] Sade [1740-1814] in some sense reinvented pain. At least, after Sade pain would never be quite the same again."

"Medicine is foundational for Sade. His use of medical knowledge cannot be dismissed....It provides him with a basis for utterly reorganizing our view of human nature."

p. 229: "Today -- when it extends beyond a fashionable, middle-class taste for spanking, whips, and leather -- sadism has passed securely into the lexicon of mental illness, explained through theories of childhood trauma, repression, passive-aggressive behavior, fears of impotence, or a reversal of the death wish. Sade, by contrast, refuses to represent even the most abnormal or self-destructive sexual behavior as illness. His libertines seem to derive an almost frightening health and robustness from the satisfaction of their cruel and chaotic desires."

RESPONSE: It seems to me that Sade's models are a significant issue to explore. He presents the idea that persons who have socially and self-destructive ideas can be energized and satisfied not just by fantasizing about these events but by actually carrying them out. His model has attracted converts from some ten generations of confused searchers.

All of my reading and thinking leads me to believe Sade's model is incorrect. In addition to causing monstrous and debilitating pain to other persons, anyone attempting to follow Sade's model sets in motion a self-destructive process akin to drug addition. The drug after a while no longer brings pleasure, it just becomes necessary to ward off uncomfortable pain.

By presenting an erroneous and self destructive model that the suggestible, vulnerable, and ignorant may accept as true, he leads them away from their own best self toward one of their worst selfs. In order to put the monster back in the cage we must do a better job of showing society the real results of such behavior. Current sources of information -- newspapers, TV, movies, novels, comic books, fairy tales, neighbors, bar tenders, clergy, etc. -- are grievously inadequate, and inaccurate. Newspapers and TV reporting titillates our fantasies and doesn't include accurate, essential information. Instead of seeing the pathetic, wretched aspects of those who ravage others, we are led to believe that they are evil, but somehow manly, almost heroic in a sick way. We are provided truncated reporting that normally fills our headlines. This sensationalism sells papers, books, movies, and TV, and feeds the fantasies of the perpetrators themselves. The miserable, pitiful, self-defeating aspects of this behavior is not included because it conflicts with our cultural mythologies about human behavior. This constant barrage of mis-information misleads even those with sufficient education and experience to know better. In reality the reporters and editors themselves believe that these acts benefit the person performing them "if they don't get caught."

The naive, or emotionally distressed person sees the behavior headlined by the media as a solution to their problem. This is true whether the acts are burglary, murder, sky jacking, bank robbery, vandalism, or any other self-destructive, anti-social behavior. They don't receive enough information to realize it is just another dead-end act leading to greater pain and/or separation from reality. Therefore, they aren't able to see that it is not the solution to their problem.

Of course it is not just gross and abjectly abnormal behavior that gets the foregoing treatment. Even the simplest acts of robbery, violence, rape suffer from the same style of reporting. We are given half-truths, error, fantasy. Biased reporting leads to the foregoing results. Therefore, some pitiful, inadequate, suffering soul has their few days in the headlines where their behavior misleads other similarly "lost souls" and encourages them into their own self-destructive behavior.

Sade's characters spring up naturally in certain kinds of societies. In societies where nurturing touch is lacking and where healthy sexuality and sexual expression are opposed, sexual deviation will be widespread. Out of the "sex is evil" society comes many of the tensions, fantasies, and taboos that lead step-by-step along the path so clearly described by Sade. And in our kind of society these acts attract the interest of other individuals suffering in the same way. Most of these persons would not engage in deviant sexual behavior. But they respond with intense interest to those who do act out. In a Christian society where sexual pleasure is seen as bad, public demonstrations of revulsion often hide secret feelings of lust. The censor is required to read every pornographic book written, and study it minutely so they can protect society against such things. These persons act with moral outrage and a virtuous "holier than though" response to things sexual. They lead a hue and cry for vengeance. But this vengeance is not restricted to the rapist, child molester, or true degenerate. Deprived individuals expunge their guilt by thrusting it onto any available victim. Frequently these victims are innocent of wrong measured by any civilized standard. Anyone who has not achieved a SFLIHM has some erroneous/unhealthy ideas, behaviors, etc. As a result there are some situations in which they will do bad things because they believe what they are doing is a good thing.

p. 230: "Theology fares even worse than philosophy at the hands of Sade's libertine medicine. Sade's contemptuous and relentless assault on Christianity as 'incompatible with the libertarian system' includes his parodic exposure of Christian attitudes toward redemptive suffering....What draws Sade to Christianity, however, is not only what he sees as its errors and hypocrisies but also its historical interest in pain, from original sin, martyrdom, and flagellation to inquisitorial torture and the torment of the damned."

RESPONSE: I would imagine that Sade's childhood experience with Christianity was one of the prime shaping forces in his own mental illness. I suspect he had a very personal stake in pointing out every weakness and deficiency in Christianity. At some point the tentative hold he had on reality may have depended on his attacks on this monstrous "enemy."

Based on his ideas and behavior I take him to have been an abused child.

Abused children are "time bombs" within any society[5]. They are the foot-soldiers of fundamentalism of every variety whether Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Jewish, etc. They provide the "true" criminals, and populate every anti-social, asocial group. I would guess they also make up the bulk of the anti-church activists in the world. A person with enough intellect and/or insight to avoid the other traps may get diverted into consuming their life-energy with random, disorganized, and basically ineffective actions against the fundamentalist religious establishments of their society.

p. 231: "The central question posed, endlessly, in Sade's work is what to make of the relationship between sexual pleasure and pain."

p. 232: "Sade's libertines move in a world where everything -- minds or souls -- is material. 'Body and soul,' Delbene summarizes, 'they are one.'"

RESPONSE: Sade got that part right, but unfortunately he missed the key element of the foregoing as a result of the tragedy of his own childhood. The oneness of body and soul makes each body more precious not less. When one is able to inflict pain on others for pleasure there must be a "bad" (ignorant) society as well as a "bad" (ignorant) person.

p. 233: "Thus Sade's work posits as a central dogma the belief that we live out a sexual fate imposed...by the nerves and tissues of our individual bodies.... physiology is destiny."

p. 234: "The legendary virtue of Titus, like the infamous vice of Nero, is nothing more than the effect of 'physical causes' hard wired in the body."

RESPONSE: In the case of Sade such a belief is very self-serving. If his bizarre ideas, drives, urges were hard-wired than he had no need to fight against them. To work to find ways to avoid them. However, I hope my writings on choice make it clear that human decisions are seldom this simple. (See THIRD WAY: Strive to make the best choices possible.) No matter what experiences we have had that make us vulnerable to the kind of thinking that Sade gave-in to, we can through proper experience, education, therapy, medicine overcome these propensities. It is the job of CPASRs to teach the foregoing message and then provide resources to help the interested individual actualize this message.

p. 236: "The most shocking revelation in Sade's work is that desire, freed from its normal social restrictions, finds its deepest satisfaction in cruelty and pain."

"Sade showed that the politics of the nervous system lead not to the sentimentalist's utopia of moral reform and human fellowship but to a tyrannous, underground system of rape, sodomy, and murder."

RESPONSE: To take Sade's writings as anything but the fantasies of an individual denied the nurturing love every child deserves seems unjustified to me. Utopia is not produced by those elements of society whose pain drives them to want to produce pain in others. Rather it comes out of persons able to draw on their love and feeling of human connection. Such healthy persons need to build organizations. Initially, these organizations must work to prevent such destructive pain in the first place. Second, these organizations must work to help those individuals become healthy who have had painful experiences -- to help them become humane human beings who can be accepted, accepting parts of the human family.

p. 237: "'No laws at all': it is this moment of complete freedom and utter ambiguity, when all ordinary structures fly apart, that fascinated Sade."

RESPONSE: Sade -- like many children raised by authoritarian, punishing parents -- saw the absence of laws as providing an opportunity for every forbidden vice. He saw it as an opportunity for total exploitation of the weak and vulnerable. This vision came out of his own defective mental health.

I support the abolition of punishment for violation of laws and rigid rules. See Chapter XXII, "A Close Look at the Criminal Justice System." But I acknowledge that figuring out how to do this will take great effort with some difficult steps until we have healthy persons and a healthy society. We must be able to make clear what good mental health means and provide the vision and resources to bring it to any person willing to make the necessary effort.

p. 237: Jeremy Bentham (PRINCIPLES OF MORALS AND LEGISLATION -- 1789): "'Nature,' wrote Bentham, 'has placed humankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.' Sade shows how a reliance on pleasure and pain can just as easily undermine every principle of law and morality."

"In celebrating cruelty, Sade in effect reverses the gesture basic to all Western liberal democracies, which...put cruelty first among moral, social, and political outrages....What gives Sade both his power and his offensiveness is the obsessive exploration of a fact we prefer not to face. Sade forces us to acknowledge that the act of inflicting pain sometimes generates intense sexual excitement."

RESPONSE: Bentham, of course, confuses the issue when he focuses on pain and pleasure as the forces governing human behavior. It is this kind of thinking that has allowed current civilizations to drift into today's chaos. (See Chapter XI, "Victor Frankl and the Meaning of Life.") Once the efforts to produce a Science of Religion/Religion of Wisdom and utilize concepts such as SFLIHM receive widespread recognition and support, it will be possible to dramatically shift world affairs.

Also, it seems necessary to address the fact that some persons may experience intense sexual excitement when they read about sadistic activity. Most of these individuals would not under any normal circumstances actually participate in such behavior. My guess is that this is not healthy fantasy, but it may be. What does the research indicate? At any rate it is a very different thing to get excited reading, or fantasizing about something and actually doing it.

Whether the act of inflicting pain can generate intense sexual excitement or not is not the point. First, I would say that this phenomena is only possible for persons who as children had certain abusive experiences. But even more important, if every individual had this character that would not give it any moral force. We will not move in the direction of our own best self and a SFLIHM by succumbing to every idle pleasure, or warped desire that crosses our mind.

Of equal importance is the way cruelty is seen in Western society. Certainly, there are many who totally oppose cruelty under all circumstances. But these are a minuscule minority. Most of Western society practices cruelty, but may call it another name. Some call it sarcasm. Others call it revenge. Many call it teaching -- whether beating the child with a belt to teach them not to hit their little sister, or being sent into a dark closet for some "wrong" act. Sometimes it just appears thoughtless -- leaving an infant for many hours in a car on a hot summer day. Other times it's devotion to God -- crawling for blocks on their bare knees on a concrete sidewalk to the alter. As mentioned in the response to p. 182, there are acts of physical and mental cruelty that go on in every police department in the land in the name of teaching obedience. Spousal abuse whether hitting, name-calling, or ignoring is not a rare event at least in the U.S. Exploiting workers in ways so diverse it would take a book to do justice to the problem. And other acts and events too numerous to mention.

What Sade does is to remove the blinders and show us cruelty without pretending its something else. All who have experienced cruelty no matter what it has been called have confused and confusing responses when they confront it and don't respond to Sade from a secure and healthy place. Rather they often respond from a warped and vulnerable place that leads them away from a SFLIHM.

p. 239: "What is at issue in this new proliferation of sadomasochistic pain [in the modern world]? We may assume, first, that it is not new, just more open than ever before. Yet its openness has raised anew some very difficult questions. Questions, for example about civil rights. What limits if any can be put on free expression? Questions about human desire. What do S & M clubs and magazines have to tell us about the human psyche? Such questions have predictable appeal both for demagogues and for legal or clinical researchers, but recently the discussion has received an unsettling jolt of reason and passion from the feminist movement."

RESPONSE: Certainly, we must do what we can to ensure society is aware of the negative and harmful effects of violence, and particularly sexual violence. Social acceptance of pleasure, particularly sexual pleasure as a social good must be part of this effort.

As for the "jolt of reason and passion from the feminist movement," I would say that it is grossly mis-focused. Unfortunately, many feminists (like all true believers) feel that they have a truer vision than anyone else and that their opinions hold special power and are worthy of special consideration. They make a big point that women are exploited in having their nude bodies photographed or if they are depicted in various demeaning sexual roles.

I would like to live in a world where no person is exploited. But until that happy day comes I'll be reluctant to see photographs of simulated sexual behavior seen as more demeaning than all the other economic exploitation that goes on daily in most businesses in the world.

Some persons have worked relentlessly to prepare themselves for a decent job. After getting it they have worked 60-80 hours per week for years. This "dedication" to their employer has left them with no time for family and friendships. Then as they have approached retirement age they have been discarded and replaced by a new "expendable." No retirement income. No family and friendships. Such examples could fill a big book. These examples would demonstrate how off-base the feminist censors' complaints are.

In the final analysis the answer to this problem is the same as for all social problems. How can we promote the concept of SFLIHM in a way that makes it more real, more important than transitory things like sexual titillation that leads one not toward their best self, but away from it? The challenge is encountered everywhere.

Every person who has a FLIHM has found some way to feel good about their life. We all have done it at the expense of consistency and ability to see things as they actually are. Many persons' FLIHM depends on ideas that are flexible enough to be expanded, altered, dropped, replaced or handled so that the individual could achieve a SFLIHM. Others have accepted models that work like crab traps. Once one gets in, it is almost impossible to get out. This is the "fundamental flaw" in all folk religions, particularly the fundamentalist wings.

Therefore, a Science of Religion and a Religion of Wisdom have an obligation to publicize their existence so that every person would be aware of them. Also, they must be improved and perfected as rapidly as possible so they apply to each person. A world where each person is able to achieve their full positive potential is needed. Every individual must be helped to develop their best self.

Many persons are open to following new paths to a better world, a better self. Ways must be found to connect with these persons and start to build the structures needed to promote and support the necessary changes.

p. 240: "Both [Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch -- after whom masochism is named] believed that men and women have only two roles available: tyrant or slave. Pain is a function of this fettered choice."

"...the erotic pain they seek and celebrate depends on a vision of radical inequality."

RESPONSE: I would like to see the above two men examined in the way Alice Miller analyzed others in THE UNTOUCHED KEY (Anchor Books, New York, 1988). My own analysis, though lacking the depth and expertise that Dr. Miller provides, is presented. I hope that it will at least point in the right direction. Dr. Miller has studied several historical figures (Pablo Picasso, Kathe Kollwitz, Buster Keaton, Friedrich Nietzsche, Abraham (of Biblical fame) -- and Adolf Hitler elsewhere). She utilizes what we know about them based on their writings or what has been written about them. In the study of Sade and Sacher-Masoch I would say it seems clear that both suffered from abusive childhoods. Because of their early childhood abuse when they were dominated by an abusive adult they attempted to re-create that period or to reverse roles with the abuser.

p. 242: "We may hope that the future will not belong to Sade. It is hard to see how a partnership culture -- to use Riane Eisler's term -- would find in Sade much more than a museum of bygone terrors. Yet such a future cannot somehow deny or forget what Sade has shown us. Moveover, Sade shows us that a truly just society would need to construct a new understanding of pain: an understanding that did not disavow but rather accepted and transformed the tendency in pain to isolate the individual and to plunge every human value into uncertainty. Meanwhile, the past and present still remain so gripped and haunted by Sade's vision of sexual pain that the tabloid press is often little more than a theater of Sadean cruelty. Our persisting social inequalities doubtless supply an indispensable precondition for such horrors, but Sade's world of sexual cruelty also depends upon a final (learned) trait that proves a distinctive feature of all his libertine heroes and heroines: apathy."

p. 243: "In almost every culture, a selective anesthesia is what permits us to tolerate the intolerable....Sade shows us what can happen in any culture when pain...has lost all memory of its contact with the tragic."

RESPONSE: Whether of not the future belongs to Sade seems to me to depend on what we teach our children and how we raise them. If we give them nurturing physical touch and help them to become integrated parts of society the idea of getting sexual kicks by inflicting pain on others will seem as bizarre as any other cruel exploitation.

However, the issue of a new understanding of pain seems important in its own right. It's not clear where this exploration should lead and how it can be satisfied. Perhaps, out of dialogue we can find the avenues to pursue to help us move in the right direction. But one thing does come to mind. Although pain can only be experienced individually, it can produce a very powerful social bond. Those who have suffered together or who are joined because of their compassion for the suffering of others can experience community in a uniquely human way. This experience may become more widespread as communication becomes easier and more complete. I think, the worst aspect of pain is the suffering alone. As we bring our suffering into community many persons might find their way to a SFLIHM through pain.

The issue of apathy strikes me as a key point in understanding Sade. Any behavior must be analyzed in terms of whether or not it promotes SFLIHM. As the positive and negative elements of a behavior are understood, these can be fed back to the individual involved. This feedback can help the individual better understand how to move in the direction of their own best self. Apathy and selective anesthesia are negative characteristics that should flag the behavior with which they are associated as undesirable. Affected persons should be helped to see the deficiencies in the behaviors they are performing. Of course the opportunity for alternative behavior is essential.

p. 245: "Ralph Waldo Emerson...argued that sickness is a major source of the tragic. 'The swift penalty of torture acute or chronic on each abuse of the organs,' he wrote in his essay on tragedy, 'produces a very large proportion of the suffering in the world.' An understanding of tragedy offers a way to begin thinking about the pain and suffering so common to illness."

RESPONSE: When illness exists because one's society failed to act to prevent it, cure it, treat it, etc. this is tragic not in the cosmic sense, but in the subjective, individual sense. One's only life is lost or painfully diminished not through any failure of their own but because of the failure of those they counted on. However, rather than invoking "tragedy," I believe it would be more useful to focus on whatever positive can now be done, and how to utilize this experience to improve what is done in the future.

p. 246: "...definitions of tragedy are not notably more successful than definitions of pain....Tragedy, I would offer (not as a definition but as a starting point) is the literary form that takes as its main social function an extended meditation on human pain and suffering."

RESPONSE: If tragedy is focused as the above proposes, it would be a worthy point for contemplation. But Morris' starting point has problems. Tragedy is not just meditation on pain and suffering. For tragedy to exist there has to be an insurmountable hurdle. This is where tragedy enters in and this is where a cosmic point of view is usually brought in. If one says pain and suffering can help the individual or society focus more clearly on the problem, and thereby provide a stairway to richer living, this is not tragedy. To have tragedy one has to have either unnecessary suffering or a cosmic dimension.

It is this cosmic dimension of pain that is not consistent with modern understanding. Even when human events end in a "tragic" way it is because of stupidity, plain ignorance, or just the way the universe is. The foregoing situations lack an essential element for cosmic tragedy -- the individual caught in a bind due to some cosmic plan. Since there are no cosmic plans, there can be no cosmic tragedy.

p. 246: "...tragedy....posits a crisis in which affliction works inseparably in body, mind, emotion, and spirit. Tragedy expresses a twofold circular wisdom: to understand pain you must understand suffering, and to understand suffering you must understand pain."

p. 254: "Philoctetes [a Greek tragedy by Sophocles c. 409 BCE] makes us feel the power of pain to reduce a life to utter emptiness and misery."

RESPONSE: Well, there is the challenge. What does pain have to say about a SFLIHM? Can a person in extreme pain experience a SFLIHM? Buddhists achieve enlightenment by ignoring pain. To the degree that it works this should provide evidence that a SFLIHM can be achieved in spite of intense pain. This issue and its ramifications seems to me one of the prime reasons for studying pain and attempting to understand it better.

Many individuals experience a FLIHM in spite of (because of?) almost unendurable pain. It seems to me that whatever can be achieved through ignorance, must be able to be achieved through knowledge, else what kind of knowledge have we achieved?

Morris provides the key (on p. 287) to how knowledge can be used to focus pain so that SFLIHM is maintained/achieved. This solution lies in sharing information about one's pain with others. If this approach can be properly developed, I think, we have made the critical step forward.

p. 254: "Doctors and patients cannot expect tragedy to offer the kind of therapeutic benefit that comedy provides."

"Tragedy according to George Steiner, shows us a vision of humankind as unwelcome guests in the universe."

RESPONSE: As indicated earlier, I believe, it takes some interpretation such as the above to provide the perspective for tragedy. Tragedy must always be based on a supernatural interpretation. What these ideas of tragedy really show is the mis-focused nature of tragedy. Human beings are a product of the Universe. It is our home, we fit perfectly into it. Only silly ideas of God and Heaven have led us to believe we do not. When we understand our true history and heritage we can discard tragedy and experience our oneness with the unconscious, indifferent, yet beautiful, bountiful Universe.

However, as indicated in other places it would seem like pain could produce a therapeutic benefit if properly utilized. If pain can help one to raise their vision to a more serious dimension of their humanity and their place in the human family, it might help an individual to experience therapeutic benefit from their pain.

p. 255: "Pain on occasion becomes the site of encounters we can do nothing except witness in respect."

"The reason why doctors and writers and all of us should think about tragic pain is because, as a culture, we are rapidly losing an understanding of tragedy -- which means we are losing one important way of thinking about human life.... [modern people] draw strength from the vision of continuing progress toward a utopian future. As a culture we do not take kindly to the tragic vision."

p. 265: "In tragedy, it is often good intentions that create suffering."

RESPONSE: I see little evidence in the things I read that a "vision of continuing progress toward a utopian future" exists in the modern world. My guess is that modern society is probably "losing an understanding of tragedy" for other reasons. Tragedy requires a view of the universe inconsistent with the modern view. It requires a "cosmic script" against which the individual struggles in vain. It's not enough that bad things happen to a good person. There has to be a deeper dimension to produce tragedy. This deeper dimension doesn't fit into a modern understanding.

The suffering created by good intentions is another example of how tragedy perpetuates a point of view inconsistent with a Science of Religion. This suffering is presented as another example of the ineffectiveness and limitations of human abilities and understanding. The foregoing is designed to keep individuals "in their place." This perspective is designed to make sure people realize that they are subservient to other powers (Power). Further, that they are helpless to resist this Power, and should tremble in its presence.

This commonly used approach negates, or even ridicules the value of knowledge and learning. It discourages people from helping each other and provides an acceptable excuse for this decision. It promotes humility, low self-esteem, minimal expectations. It ridicules the value of the individual as part of a healthy society. It scorns the idea that the quality of human life can be improved. It teaches that life is uncertain, and meaningless without God.

p. 266: "People continue to make self-destructive choices in pursuing goals that give their lives meaning."

"Tragic choices and tragic events are by definition unhealthy. Yet tragedy would tell us that we might be much healthier as a culture if we did not turn away from suffering, if we stopped trying to cancel pain and to prolong life at all costs, and if we gave up trying to ban or to remove from sight everything that frightens us with the pre-monition of our own death."

RESPONSE: For me the purpose of a Religion of Wisdom is to help individuals avoid making self-destructive choices as they attempt to experience a SFLIHM. To look for a tragic dimension of these choices seems to me to be counter-productive. If we see "tragic" choices as stupid mistakes, due to erroneous, or insufficient information that can be corrected -- the method for improvement seems obvious. But when we see these choices as tragic in the traditional meaning of this term, we have exaggerated their importance. There is the danger that this approach leads one to idealize suffering and make it seem glamorous. To experience "tragedy" somehow makes one's dumb choices more romantic, almost desirable. To suffer the consequences of ignorance, stupidity, and shallow thinking is totally lacking in glamour.

Tragedy moves one out of reality into attempts to follow scripts of confused people's plays. It seems clear to me that we need to have a more positive way to look upon pain then we have, one that has nothing to do with tragedy. Our new approach would permit one to achieve a SFLIHM even if they are experiencing intense pain. This approach would allow one to utilize pain without welcoming it.

I think, a Wise Community would want to do everything possible to prevent useless pain and to eliminate it when it exists. However, it must teach ways to accept pain with equanimity when it occurs. But, perhaps, more important we must learn how to avoid letting the threat of pain deter us from the greater good. We might use as our models dancers and athletes (as pointed out by Morris on his p. 194). And we could add mountain climbers, fire fighters, explorers, or anyone on the frontiers where the body is actively used as a tool for work or exploration.

Life is not about being comfortable, though we all need comfort in our lives. Life is about using the opportunity of our existence to add to and utilize the store of human knowledge and experience. There will always be times when individuals will have to make the choice between sacrificing their life or not in order to actualize their beliefs. We must be alive in order to achieve a SFLIHM. However, we must recognize that our death is part of our life. As a result sustainable means congruency with the most worthy attributes of our species and the universe of which death is a fundamental part.

Needless suffering, unnecessary death, pointless joy and happiness based on ignorance, should not be promoted. The goal of a Science of Religion would be to help persons distinguish between the foregoing things and make choices that lead to a SFLIHM.

Certainly a Religion of Wisdom must incorporate those in pain, or those who are disfigured, etc. as active participants in society and a SFLIHM. But before we can successfully achieve the foregoing we must learn how to become a society that is joined together by concern for each other. We must develop ways to provide support to help each citizen be all that they can be.

p. 268: "The [current]...organic model [of pain]....sputters and wheezes when forced to work with the new idea that pain is not a sensation but a perception: an experience in which consciousness, emotion, meaning, and social context all play an important part."

RESPONSE: Sensation: an experience arising directly from stimulation of sense organs.

I would say that all of our experience and thinking show us that nothing of which a person is aware can be a sensation in the most literal meaning of this term. The very act of being aware of any stimulus means it has been processed by enough brain cells to no longer qualify it as a sensation. Even acute pain has this aspect. It, no less than chronic pain, depends on the meaning we assign to the pain stimulus. Our interpretation will effect the magnitude of pain experienced, its duration, whether it is seen as evidence of our self-control or our vulnerability to exploitation, whether it provokes a feeling of satisfaction or depression, etc.

p. 269: "Pain, in effect, is no mere physiological event. It is simultaneously emotional, cognitive, and social."

RESPONSE: What does it mean to say "mere physiological event"? To me emotion is a physiological event as is cognition and any meaning of social that in any way effects the behavior of an individual.

If one thinks of physiological as the simplest meaning of stimulus-response, than the above quote might have some meaning. But when one recognizes physiological as any bodily activity, then obviously all pain is a physiological event as is thinking, memory, communication with God, or anything else of which an individual is capable or of which they think they are capable.

p. 269: "The future is likely to see large numbers of doctors and patients supplement or replace the old one-dimensional organic model with a new multidimensional model that encompasses the intersecting physiological, emotional, cognitive, and social aspects of pain. Pain, as I have been claiming, is not simple, static, universal code of nerve impulses but an experience that continues to change as it passes through the complicated zones of interpretation we call culture, history, and individual consciousness. We need to start listening to the specialists in pain centers who are arguing on the basis of striking new research what various patients and writers have been saying, implicitly, for years: that anything beyond the most commonplace acute pain is a complex perceptual experience taking place not strictly within the individual nervous system but also within the open-ended, social field of human thought and action. Pain, we are slowly beginning to recognize, is far more than merely a medical issue. It exists within us only as it wraps itself up, for better or worse, in meaning."

RESPONSE: But as indicated earlier the foregoing applies not only to pain, but to all human perception/feeling. Certainly a Wise Person needs to be very clear on this point and learn how to include this understanding in the ways we develop programs, and help people in their lives.

p. 271: "Civilization...not only insulates the upper classes from discomfort but is built upon the pain of the masses."

RESPONSE: Perhaps, we need to find a new definition of civilization. To me a Wise Community must be structured so that all individuals share equally in the rewards of society and the pain of maintaining it. To think that the many must suffer so that the few can maintain culture, sophistication, civilization strikes me as an erroneous formulation of the issues.

Shared pain can be an intense bonding experience as long as all share in it. But only persons living in ignorance can feel bonded to others who would benefit from their suffering, but not share in it.

p. 276: "A list of conditions that frequently accompany chronic pain would include divorce, rape, spouse-abuse, incest, depression, child-abuse, grief, alcoholism, obesity, suicide, bankruptcy, drug addiction, unemployment, dead-end jobs, and quarrelsome, impossible families."

RESPONSE: Of course the above behaviors exist throughout society. As far as I know they are usually not related to chronic pain. The critical question is, What is the relationship between chronic pain and these conditions? If it is significantly higher than in the general population then much study and interpretation is warranted. A significantly higher relationship would also present an impressive challenge for a CPASR intent on producing a Wise Community. Each of the above conditions represents a failure of current society, but an opportunity for the future. They remind us how far we have to go since everywhere we look we see similar behavior. Certainly, our work is cut out for us if we would want to make a paradise on earth (a Wise Community made up of Wise Persons). However, to me the prognosis is hopeful. I view each of these behaviors as coming out of ignorance and lack of social support.

p. 279: "We need to acknowledge that pain can serve multiple purposes and hold multiple meanings beyond its basic function as a signal of tissue damage."

p. 284: "Nietzsche...in 1874....managed his ailments in a manner both idiosyncratic and typically shrewd. 'I have given a name to my pain,' he wrote, 'and call it dog'....the useful point to grasp...is that Nietzsche has in effect taken charge of his pain. He has assigned it a personal place and meaning. His crucial move, in fact, is to assign his pain a position of inferiority... Nietzsche decides, typically, that he will be the master rather than the slave."

"Too many patients implicitly accept a definition of their illness that enslaves them and makes pain the master."

RESPONSE: The above seems like another seminal approach for developing a framework in which to experience and deal with pain. Nietzsche shows us a way to put pain in a perspective that does not leave one as the victim. This is easy to talk about, but how easy is it to do?

p. 287: "Emmanual Levinas in his essay, USELESS SUFFERING (1982) proposes a way of understanding that begins from the premise that pain is utterly negative, absurd, and evil....Suffering, he proposes, opens up an ethical dimension....My own useless suffering...takes on a changed meaning if it becomes the occasion for your empathic, even suffering response. This is what Levinas calls a suffering for the suffering of someone else."

RESPONSE: Levinas' idea of focusing on the pain that promotes community -- coming together because of one's compassion for another's suffering -- seems real and important.

p. 289: "...how we experience pain has almost everything to do with how we understand it."

RESPONSE: For me the foregoing is a critical message for us to hear and understand. It becomes clear that a framework is necessary in which the individual can interpret pain. This framework needs to give pain a positive effect rather than a negative one. This interpretation should also inspire individuals to broaden the scope of their vision to give it more breadth and depth. Life is not just about joy, sunshine and flowers. It is also about pain, suffering and having community and shared fellowship made even more meaningful by our pain.

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1. THE CULTURE OF PAIN, David B. Morris, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991.

2. Leo Tolstoy's DEATH OF IVAN ILYCH portrays a bourgeois civil servant in late nineteenth-century Russia who becomes consumed by pain and has his satisfying, secular, self-centered, commonplace existence moved to a place of ultimate peace with his pain in a detachment that suggests the attainment of a theological position almost outside of time.

3. "The classical moment represents pain as something that ennobles even as it destroys. More precisely, pain in effect brings out or expresses a potential for nobility that is latent but often unrealized. This view of pain underwrites one of the most famous artifacts in the history of sculpture: the Late Hellenistic statue of Laocoon. Created in the first century B.C. by three sculptors from the Greek island of Rhodes (Hagesandros, Polydoros, and Athanadoros), this monument to the legendary Greek hero with the most unpronounceable name (Lay-ock-a-wan) depicts a scene described at length in Virgil's AENEID. Indeed the legend is inseparable from the sculpture and surrounds the visual form with its invisible web of meanings."

The statue consists of Laocoon and his two small sons bound by the coils of two dragon like serpents.

4. A "painted, sentimental, suicidal hero of [Johann Wolfgang von] Goethe's SORROWS OF YOUNG WERTHER (1774) who make the union of sentiment, beauty, and pain into a theme capable of transforming the map of Europe."

5. For evaluation of these ideas see any of Alice Miller's books, including FOR YOUR OWN GOOD.

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