Joy & Pain

Jared: Welcome to Delicate Fire. Today we'll be exploring the Aphorisms of Effective Choice by Forrest Landry. If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments or head to delicatefire.com and join the Signal community. Be sure to like and subscribe and follow along. Thanks so much. I look forward to hearing from you soon. Hey Forrest, good to see you again. And last week we spoke about friendship, just such a beautiful topic, and you really gave some really beautiful downloads on that. And I'm wondering now about Joy and pain. I think we mentioned that as another thing to bookmark. And could you speak more to the ideas of the concepts of joy and pain and what are— So I bookmarked—

Forrest: This in the conversation around conflict because there is a whole constellation of specific notions connected to these two concepts, joy and pain, as ideas that show up in various places in what might be thought of as the philosophical literature or the psychological literature, trauma resolution and all that kind of stuff. I was reminded of it when we were talking about conflict resolution or relational repair. And I'm thinking now that honestly, I want to spend some time really detailing what do we mean by, get this again, joy and pain, right? Last week we spent some time really explaining like, what is the essence of friendship? Similarly, I want to talk about what is the essence of joy and what is the essence of pain so that we kind of know what we're talking about when we use those words.

And believe me, people know what those things are experientially. Like, if you're in pain, there's just no doubt about it. And you can usually tell when you're in joy, like that's an experience that you sort of have much the same way. And somebody might be saying, well, why are you even putting these in relation to one another? Like, are they genuinely connected? Or what does it mean to be in pain so that I can essentially do something about pain? And why are you even talking about joy?

Now, in the underlying theory of the metaphysics, which talks about the nature interaction, fundamental relationships, all the way down to what we might think of as particle physics level or mathematics levels, the notion of human relationships is so stripped away that what's left, the bare Spartan notion of an interaction itself is treated as too simple to contemplate. But there's a sense in which in our thinking about what is the essence of pain at a human level, it comes down to that same notion of interaction. That same notion of the relationship between perceiver, perceived, and perceiving. And so we're talking about the perceiving as a process, as opposed to just the perceiver having the experience. And the notion of pain as if it is something that is perceived as an object.

So to really get at the notion of what's going on, I have to basically unpack the interaction. I have to unpack the relationship between the subjective and the objective, or self and world, or self and other, in order to really be able to even have the language to describe what is actually going on when we have this sensation with which we attach this label pain, right?

And so I'm going to focus on, as the immanent metaphysics would normally recommend, start with the relationship, start with what's going on in between, between the subjective and the objective, between the experiential sensation and this thing, the thing we're experiencing. Like, I know that sounds at this point sort of like, well, aren't those the same? Well, usually we treat them as synonymous with the interaction itself. So it's actually 3 things that we're normally treating as the same. But in order to make this expression clear, I have to kind of distinguish those. What is experienced, who's experiencing it, and the nature of the process of having an experience.

Okay. So having set up that infrastructure, now we can basically set up the actual definition. Pain is when there is perceived to be a decrease in the potentialities available to self. Now, I'm sure listening to this, you and probably anyone else that happens to watch this is probably going to say, what the? Just drop a couple of F-bombs in there. Anyways, they're going to basically say, what is that? How does that have anything to do with this notion of pain?

Well, okay, we'll answer that question, but it's going to take a few minutes, right? So be patient. The first thing that we're noticing is that pain is a perception. It is a perception that I'm having that there is a decrease of potentiality in my future available to me. Potentiality is available to self, right? A decrease in the potentiality available to self is essentially a sense in which my future opportunities are going to be noticeably less than my past ones. And that the perception of that engenders within me the experience of pain.

That's why I'm defining it this way is I'm basically saying I'm now going to present it as not just a definition, but as a hypothesis. My hypothesis is that when I experience a decrease in potentiality for me, for my future, that every time there will be an experience of pain associated with that perception, that the perception will have a feeling component that is in a one-to-one relationship with this cognitive component. So it's that association between the feeling component and the cognitive component, which is the beingness of the pain. So that's why, again, I got to distinguish between subject, object, and relation. The definition is essentially an assertion that there is this connection. But the experience of that reality is to some extent now coupled with this formal element and this sort of informal element.

Let's now give some examples, because that's probably the easiest way to make this concrete. But I wanted to start with the abstract idea to show why these motivations, why these examples are motivated to be examples. Let's start with something basic. On my hand, I have a scar. Obviously the camera's probably not going to be able to pick that out. There's a scar right here. Okay. And so, so what happened? Well, a long while ago, I was carving a bird in the woodshop and the knife slipped and basically it went right across here. Okay. I know bad scene.

Anyways, here's what's happening. There's flow of skin and neurons. And blood vessels carrying blood and veins carrying blood coming back and all of the tendons and just the stuff of the body that is normally in a continuous relationship across that region is now in a discontinuous relationship across that region. That's what a cut is. You've basically interrupted the flow of your body. Now, interestingly, anywhere there's an interruption in flow, the level of potentialities available is going to be less because it was the flow that made it functional in the first place. Like if I have a tube that's carrying blood from point A to point B and I cut the tube, it's no longer a tube that can carry blood from point A to point B. It's less potential to carry blood from point A to point B.

I mean, I'm not meaning to— it's, you know, the risk of this sort of stuff is on one hand it seems like super abstract and at the same time it's actually really simple. A thing that can do a thing has more potential than a thing that can't do a thing straight out. Right. So then we could say something along the lines of, okay, given that I can't use my finger because I can't feel the finger anymore. The signals aren't going anywhere.

Jared: So the muscles aren't activating, right?

Forrest: Not getting enough blood. I mean, there's a whole lot of stuff going wrong. Okay.

Jared: Right.

Forrest: So I don't have the potential to use my thumb.

Jared: Yeah. Yeah.

Forrest: Now on one hand you would say, well, of course that's not what's— the person that's cut is not thinking about the function of the thumb, but actually they are.

Jared: Right. It's in there. Yeah.

Forrest: And the body all the way down to the level of the neuron itself is noticing the interrupt. And so it's basically saying, hey, I used to be able to send signals over here and I used to be able to receive signals from over here, but that's not happening anymore. Something is wrong. The functional dimension. I can't do the thing I used to be able to do. So at this point, that's the sensation. This isn't a description. It's an identity. Right. That's my point is that there's no cognitive process necessarily involved. It's strictly at the level of the function not having the potential and that being so endemic to the reality of the situation that the implications of that are felt as pain regardless of what level you're talking about. Whether it be at the level of the neuron itself is the signal that you're receiving or the actual function of that part of the body or the way in which that basically implies shit, I'm not going to be able to be at the jungle gym tomorrow and climb up that 30-meter wall because my thumb doesn't work.

Jared: Mm-hmm.

Forrest: Yeah. Incidentally, when I cut myself there, it wasn't quite that bad. But anyways, my point is that it's still gonna be something that is gonna prevent me from using it. Right. And so it's kind of like, oh shit, this just messed up my whole week.

Jared: Right.

Forrest: If it had been my right hand, I wouldn't even be able to write.

Jared: Right, right.

Forrest: Believe me.

Jared: And that's kind of where like the ideas come into play where like if you see, for example, the cut and you immediately are like, oh no, like I will never be able to use my thumb again or something, then like that would've been even worse. Immediate, like so much pain there.

Forrest: Tremendous regret. Like, oh my God, stupid. I can't believe I was so— It would spiral.

Jared: Exactly.

Forrest: Yeah, exactly.

Jared: Right.

Forrest: More like that.

Jared: Whereas like if the perception was like a cut, I bet it'll heal. Like I can move my thumb now. Or like maybe it's not like there's something like this may be like a short speed bump, but it's not gonna like permanently injure me or permanently damage my long-term health.

Forrest: Right. But it's gonna hurt while you can't use it.

Jared: It's gonna hurt.

Forrest: And it'll stop hurting when you can use it.

Jared: Right. Right.

Forrest: It's kind of basically the way it works most of the time. I mean, there's obviously people have phantom limb pain, right? But I noticed that's still connected to function. They can't use the hand that's missing. So in effect, there's a sense here of the relationship between function and pain is really direct. And so that's why I say perceived potentials available to self and then a decrease of that.

But this isn't the only example. People are going to say, well, there's no cut when my boyfriend breaks up with me or something like that. Like, what does that have to do with this? And I'm like, actually, that's a very good example. I noticed that if you're in a relationship, you're in a couple relationship, there's things that are functional that are happening. You have the opportunity to maybe start a family or you have the opportunity to go to the movies together or to go on vacation together and have probably more fun doing those things than you would have if you went by yourself. Right? Celebration in particular tends to involve communities of people. And if you go alone, it's going to feel a little different than if you went as a couple with all the rest of the couples that are already there.

So in effect, there's a sense in which you're saying, my anticipation of being able to do all these things with you is contingent upon my being with you. And if you break up with me, then all the dreams I had of all the things I could do with you and enjoy more doing together are now gone.

Jared: Right.

Forrest: So you feel the loss of the potentialities to do those things that you were hoping to do together as no longer being available, potentialities available to self. And what is the experience you have? You start probably feeling really unhappy about the end of the relationship, emotional pain, same thing. So in effect, there's a sense here in which it doesn't really matter. Notice that the definition of pain didn't specify anything about who. It only specified something about what, and it had to do in terms of potentials relative to you right now.

And so now we can bridge to the joy side of the equation. So what would your guess be as to what the definition of joy is, given that the definition of pain is the perception that is the experience that I associate with the perception of a decrease in potentialities available to self. What does the definition of joy therefore have to be?

Jared: I would say that the definition of joy has something to do with the perception of an increase in the potentialities of the self.

Forrest: Potentials available to self. Potentials available. Yeah. Great. Wasn't that easy?

Jared: Very easy.

Forrest: Like, I mean, look at this. We just now all of a sudden define joy. Okay. That is a philosophical achievement we should be celebrating, right? So in effect, there's a sense here in which we've just given ourselves a recipe to understand not just when we're experiencing pain, but also what it is that we need to create in order to experience joy. Yes. Right? You want to create a circumstance where your future opens up.

Now, let's put it in a work setting for a moment because that's a more obvious scenario, right? You're working hard. You're going for, I don't know, maybe a promotion or something that's going to give you what? More money or a corner office or something, but also maybe more opportunities to do more interesting things because now you have a team of people working for you or something, right? Now, here's the thing, your future potentials because of the increase in money or increase in control or status or whatever else that most people are going for in the corporate world these days. The point is that you experience the awards of that, hopefully potentials available to self. Honestly, I should probably have picked a different example because I'm now realizing that, oh yeah, they're going to pay me more money, but they're probably going to add 5 times as much responsibility. And now I'm going to be working 24/7 rather than just say, occasionally on weekdays. So in effect, there's a sense in which maybe I don't want that anymore.

Jared: Right.

Forrest: So let's go back to the relational setting. You met a new woman and it's looking like she's really good, cooperative, easy to get along with, has roughly the same interests and directions in life. And you're thinking, wow, if we develop a relationship, then I can start a family or go on these vacations or share all of this stuff, right? We're back to the friendship thing. I can share these things. Someone will actually care when I maybe get the promotion that's actually a good promotion.

Jared: Yeah.

Forrest: Now I gotta think carefully and discern whether that's actually a good thing, but say it was, okay. No, easier. You and your team won the local football game or something, right?

Jared: Right.

Forrest: Like that's something you can celebrate pretty much cleanly, right? So in effect, there's a sense in which maybe you would care that your partner all of a sudden is delighted that, oh, you guys won the game. I'm so happy for you. Right. That would be a sense in which you're feeling that you could share and do celebration. And that's way more than it would have been previously if you're just sort of like, yeah, I won the game, but I'm going home and the house is empty. Like those people who don't have family, parents or children, if you're orphaned in the world and don't have any friends, then quite frankly, it's kind of suck.

So what we have here is a situation where it's not just that we want to learn what friendship is, it's that we want to have that recipe so that we can develop friendships. And similarly, if we have the recipe for joy, we can start to develop more opportunities for joy because we know, oh, I want to put myself in situations where there is likely to be a situation where the potentials are actually increasing, and if they are actually increasing, I want to notice that. Because it's just as bad to not notice joy as it is to not notice pain.

Jared: That's a good point.

Forrest: If you don't notice pain and you start using that broken thumb, it's probably just going to make it worse.

Jared: Right.

Forrest: And if you don't notice joy when it's happening, then you won't get to experience that because then you'll be in a higher potentiality state and increasing potentiality even further is going to be increasingly difficult the more potential. At some point or another, let's say you won the game, you have all the money, you have everything—

Jared: Like, you know, yeah. Where do you go from there? Yeah.

Forrest: Like what is hedonistically available to someone like Musk beyond what he's already got available to him?

Jared: Like, right.

Forrest: Really anything? You get the idea, right?

Jared: Yeah.

Forrest: So in effect, there's a notion here which you're like saying, given that there's a sort of ceiling as to all the potential, I want to notice every step as best as I can, because otherwise I won't get to experience that at all.

Jared: And that also brings up the idea of gratitude too. Like the idea of like the gratitude of like, wow, what brought me here? Like all this potential.

Forrest: That's why celebration and gratitude are so important. You have to have enough humility in order for you to have this sensation and to do the noticing.

Jared: Right. Right.

Forrest: Because if you're so much projecting as to what you think it ought to be, that even when the potential is increasing and you're thinking, oh, well, those weren't the right potentials, it should have been these other ones. You're a fucking fool. You just denied yourself the very thing you were looking for for no reason at all.

Jared: Right. Right.

Forrest: That's just dumb. I mean, just straight up. So in effect, there's a point here in which we notice that comes out of this is this thing called hedonistic adaptation. And fortunately it works the other way too. You can kind of get used to arbitrary levels of pain and we call that depression. Like I don't have any options open to myself. Everything sucks. This is it. Well, the good news is that everything from there is going to be an opening potentially. So at least there's the possibility of joy.

Jared: Right.

Forrest: And, but the main thing that is now super important is that given these foundations, like, so first of all, notice that the way in which we define these terms is not just coherent with how we actually experience them in the world realistically, and more or less everywhere, both for pain and for joy. Notice that these definitions are not just coherent with the reality of the situation, but they're starting to explain things like hedonistic adaptation and/or rock bottom. If you happen to have an addiction and it's like at a certain point you've experienced all the pain you can, right? It's just not possible for it to be any more constrained than it is. And therefore that's going to be, yeah, it's going to hurt and you're going to suffer a lot, but the good news is that rock bottom basically is an assertion of it can't get any worse.

Now, just for being very specific about this, because life is already at an extremely high level of development, we have a million cells as a multicellular organism, billions of brain neurons and all sorts of fantastic complexity. So rock bottom essentially means being a rock. So there's a lot of complexity levels between being a human being and being a rock. So I don't want anyone to count on rock bottom as basically being some sort of limit. It's not. Never underestimate the human capacity to endure pain, but don't rely on that. That's just plain like, no, just that won't work.

But the point here is that aside from some specific things where we have to basically name these exceptions, right? That human life in the context of the entire universe, which is made out of basically inert matter, rocks and gases. So the universe is really big, right? So if we were to ask about what is the percentage of the universe that's conscious, like the amount of animate matter, sentient beings as a function of the volume of the universe. Okay. There's a zero, a lot of more zeros against some small number down there, way out of sight, right? In effect, we really want to appreciate what we got. Don't mess it up, basically. And I mean that for the planet as well as for you as a person.

In this sense, the stakes are noticeable, right? And therefore the skill that we have to bring to bear is noticeable, which means that concrete definitions like this are important so that we know that we're in right relationship to the practice.

So in this sense, we're saying, okay, given all of this, the coherency of the definitions, the fact that they connect to real truths in life, the fact that this actually matters in all of these different ways, what does this reveal? What are the implications? Well, in effect, there's a few things that are now available for us to say that were not part of Western philosophical canon previously, but now can be. Joy and pain are not opposites. You're not going to experience joy no matter how much pain you experience. You're not going to experience pain no matter how much joy you experience. They are, in a sense, not a transactional relationship between them. So the experience of one doesn't justify the experience of the other, or it doesn't create a kind of imbalance that is necessarily going to resolve in the automatic likelihood of the experience of another.

Now, we can see that that's true in general and that there are exceptions where it makes it more likely. Like if you're at rock bottom, ignoring the sort of complexity differences that implied between human beings and actual rocks, which we can't ignore in this case, unfortunately. But the notion here is that if you're in pain, it's easier to not be in pain than it is to experience more pain in general. If you're at rock bottom already, that's kind of why we call rock bottom that. It's kind of like everything already hurts, can't make it hurt anymore. So at least under those circumstances, the chances of it being likely that you will experience an opening of more potential from no potential is actually pretty high.

So people think if you hurt a lot, then you've earned the right to have a little bit of joy. Whereas I'm just noticing that on a statistical distribution, you're rolling, flipping a coin 100 times in a row, that there's a pretty good chance that one of them is going to be heads. So now you have an increase in potential and you'll experience joy if you're at that level.

Also, it is the case that if you're experiencing a totality of joy, then you're basically saying, I'm expecting that the next 100 coin tosses are all going to be heads, and if there's any tails, well, that's going to be a hurt.

Jared: Right, right, right.

Forrest: But in the middle, they don't imply one another. And their implication is statistical, not a logical, not a moral implication. And those differences are specifically why I'm mattering, why it matters. It's not the case that God will create suffering for you, and therefore, because you have suffered, that it will then, out of acknowledgement of your suffering will therefore create an experience of joy for you. I'm sorry, that's just not how it works. Same for the reverse. Oh, this person has been experiencing too much joy. They have it better than everyone else. I'm going to strike them down so that they can experience suffering like the rest of those people do.

Jared: Yeah. Yeah.

Forrest: The beingness of the totality of all life subjectivity or objectivity, regardless of whether you're thinking about a universe or whatever, it just doesn't work that way.

Jared: Yeah.

Forrest: I'm sorry.

Jared: Yeah, what's great— what came to mind was like this kind of like the joy and pain as kind of like conjugates to intensity.

Forrest: That's exactly right.

Jared: Yeah. And just in that, there's like, obviously, like you brought up God and I was thinking about Christ and I was thinking about, okay, well, that is like an extreme example of the intensity of pain on the cross being extremely high. And then also the potentiality of joy being there as well in like a different way.

Forrest: But that's not why that example's important. The thing that makes that particular symbol so interesting. And so I wanna basically contrast that with the Buddha on the other hand, right?

Jared: Yeah. Great.

Forrest: So Christ on the cross is an example of pretty much as painful as it's gonna get. His students, one of them basically betrayed him. The rest of them can't help him. He's got, he's basically nailed, like there's nails through his arms. I mean, like, and it's dry and there's no water and it's hot and it's like, I mean, like it's gotta be supremely uncomfortable and pretty much like, yeah, I'm dying up here. There's no potentials available to me at all. This is it.

Right. But here's the thing. The story basically says they know not what they do, that that's what he says. Right. Now think about what that implies. That implies fundamentally that despite the fact that he's in enormous pain, he hasn't given up his faith. Right? He is still in integrity with himself. And that sense of, despite the experience of enormous physical pain, that my spiritual integrity remains. And it's demonstrated under the most obvious extreme circumstances that his spiritual integrity is inviolate, cannot be diminished. That's what is meant by that example. It's essentially a sort of a proof or a guarantee of spiritual authority.

Now, people talk about the resurrection as being the thing. I'm kind of like, well, actually, that's even less interesting than the fact that he was on the cross, didn't know that he was going to be resurrected, right? It's one thing to basically say, oh yeah, I have a get-out-of-free card, and God will take care of me and it'll be just fine. No, it's the fact that he didn't know that at the time that was the issue, right? And so in effect, there's a sense here in which when we say, oh, even under the circumstances of perfected pain, spiritual integrity remains, that the integrity of self in effect can be held even despite the fact of this, that there's a truth to that.

And this is why I mentioned the Buddha a minute ago, was basically the Buddha is the exact opposite example. An experience of transcendental alignment, nirvana, samadhi, right? Like the experience of ultimate joy, union with the universe, right? Because remember, say for example, that we talk about pain as an interrupt of the flow. When the thing comes back together again, it all of a sudden feels good.

Jared: Right.

Forrest: There's the obvious example of what tends to feel good to bodies when people basically make children, right? Like that feels good because it's a coming together. It's a joyful occasion, or at least it should be. So in effect, there's a sense in which as relationships come together, as communities come together, there's a moment of joy experience on the part of the people coming together because the coming together part creates potentialities that are more than the people divided. If you have two people cooperating with one another, their effectiveness as a unit is much more than the sum of their parts. It's some sort of product. And technically you can think of it as maybe having even exponential aspects. Metcalfe's law is a thing, for example.

So in effect, there's a sense in which division not just creates an interrupt, but it creates a loss of potential that is greater than the functionality of the things divided. And bringing things together creates joy that is potentials in excess of the things combined. Or in this case, the people combined, right? So Buddha has now an experience with everyone, the universe, the ultimate possible joining you could imagine, right? No division of consciousness at all. Okay. That is peak joy, the same way that Christ is experiencing peak pain. Yeah.

Okay. Now what happens? He doesn't just float off into utopia, basically he decides to come back to Earth and teach how to have people live lives that don't have as much suffering. He's basically addressing the problem of suffering. And the world has gone on and a bunch of people have effectively said, yeah, suffering is bad. Let's start working on that. And so now we have a lot of people who live in comfort. So the problem of suffering has actually been addressed and now everybody's diverting all the technological surplus and energy to comfort, entertainment, and power seeking or war making or some similar thing. Gaming, I guess. And this is obviously a problem for reasons that have to do with conversations that go well outside of the scope of talking about aphorisms of effective choice. Go see one of the other channels where I talk about existential risk and you can experience sheer abject terror at liberty. Fantastic.

Anyways, when we come back, no, it's just, it is so obscene. It is so far out there that at some point or another, the only thing you can do is have a sense of humor. Because you need like a rock-solid fundamental spiritual integrity to withstand that sort of thing. Otherwise, you go crazy immediately. So in this sense, it's important for us to have examples of what is integrity at a self-level, at a spiritual level, at a soulful level in these circumstances as exemplars as to why do we trust these people to give us advice about things about how to live.

And fortunately we don't have to test everybody to do that. In fact, you don't have to take my word on any of this. Please don't. Check it against your own experience. See whether these tools help you to make sense of your life. See whether these ideas actually work, whether they help you to make sense, whether they make things clearer for you, whether they make your relationships easier. And if that's the case, then good. Fantastic. Goodo. You have a sense in which now there is a sense of what do I need to do to make it less likely to experience pain? What do I do to make it more likely to experience joy?

And obviously notice that this is unnurturing. I can't compel potentialities to just appear. I can make it more likely that bad things will not happen. I can make it more likely that good things will. But notice there's no control, there's no compulsion. You can be in right relation and through that integrity, make it dramatically more likely for things to go in this right way because now you're oriented. It's just as important what the potentials are as it is what the actualities are. Most people only pay attention to what they can see with their eyes. But it's just as important to have vision about what could be as it is to have awareness of what is.

So if you have a map, and you have a compass and you know your current position, you've got the map lined up so that you know I'm at this point on this map and this is the world around me and I see which way to go and I can see over there is a place I want to go and that corresponds to this point on the map. Here's how I navigate how to get there. So in this sense, orienting around potentiality and that which could be the future is just as important as orienting around the past.

But in order to do that, ironically enough, we have to come back into right-holding in the present what's going on in the animal so that we can reach up into the divine. We can't be divine unless we encompass all that is actually the case, including these orienting situational factors about actuality and potentiality. But if you're just looking out into the future and the past and you're not present in the moment in the fullness, you can't take all of these quadrants and be in the wholeness of what is truly human.

So in this sense, these concepts act as guides for functional behavior to develop high-quality relationships, to have better life experiences, to be healthier, to create families that work, to create communities that work, to essentially be the mediation by which the right relationship between nature, man, and technology actually works. Because right now the technology factor's out of balance. As I said, people are misusing it for comfort, entertainment, and war. And frankly, that is gonna be the end of us all if we don't turn and change course. But again, that's another story for another day. Back to you.

Jared: Well, in this channel of entertainment, hopefully people are finding and seeing the deep value of actually doing this work and feeling the structuring that's coming from deeply taking in this metaphysics and taking in this effective choice and hopefully coming to us to connect. Please, if you see this, reach out and join us on the Signal community. It'll be on the website. We love to see you. So I'll see you next week, Forrest.

Forrest: Okay, more teaching to come.

Jared: Perfect. This was Delicate Fire. Thank you so much for joining us, where we explore the aphorisms of effective choice. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments or head to delicatefire.com and join the Signal community. Please like and subscribe if you want to follow along, and I look forward to seeing you next week.