(9.88ab) If painful feelings are truly existent, they can never be changed,
And it follows that living beings never experience pleasant feelings.

Another aggregate we grasp at strongly, keeping us firmly within our samsara, is the mental factor feeling.   We think it matters how we feel at any time.  We feel it is so important that we feel good and that we do not feel bad.  We grasp at and are very attached to pleasant feelings and we grasp at and are averse to unpleasant feelings.  If we look at how society is organized and people act, it seems this is the most important consideration in our society.  And what is the result?   We are preoccupied then with the favorable and the unfavorable.  We focus all our energy on changing our external conditions so that we have pleasant feelings and we don’t have unpleasant feelings.  Like everyone else, we set our sights on the immediate and not on the future, such as our future lives.  We want one type of feeling and we do not want the other.  This preference is itself keeping us in samsara.  This preference is samsara.

There is enormous freedom to be had from a true equanimity with respect to our feelings – both are equally good, just in different ways.  They are not equally good to our worldly concerns, but they are equally good to our spiritual concerns.  Whether we have equanimity with respect to our feelings or not depends primarily on our concerns.  How do we change our concerns to be spiritual concerns?  Again, the lamrim.  Lamrim is the real panacea that solves all our problems because nothing is a problem for a lamrim mind.  If we learn to enjoy equally all feelings, pleasant or unpleasant, would we suffer anymore?  Would we not be liberated?

We generally determine whether something is a cause of happiness or suffering on the basis of how it makes us feel, but this is completely deceptive.  Drugs feel good, but they bring only suffering.  Working hard at overcoming our delusions does not feel good, but it brings only happiness.  Gen-la Khyenrab said that an ordinary being primarily follows the aggregate of feeling, whereas a spiritual practitioner primarily follows the aggregate of discrimination.  Feelings are not a reliable guide, wisdom is.

Shantideva here explains to us how our feelings are not truly existent.  Because we feel they are.  We feel that no matter how we discriminate things, it will not change how we feel or experience them.  But this is clearly wrong.  For example, if we drank something very sweet, and then later learned that it is poison.  This will radically change our experience of the drink.  We feel like we are ‘in’ pain, when it is more correct to say, ‘there is the appearance of pain in my mind.’  This makes all the difference in terms of whether we experience pain or not.  We need to get a feeling for the emptiness of our feelings, it is the feeling of lightness and freedom, having completely let go.  Like clouds passing through the sky.

We also need to make a distinction between experiencing painful feelings and experiencing suffering.  It is perfectly possible to experience painful feelings, but not suffer from them.  For example, when people lift weights or engage in strenuous exercise, they experience considerable pain, but they are happy to do so because they know they are growing stronger.  As they say, “no pain, no gain.”  The pain we feel of being stuck with a needle is not suffering if we know it is giving us a life-saving vaccine.  Painful feelings plus non-acceptance of the painful feelings equals suffering.  Painful feelings plus a Dharma mind towards the painful feelings equals blessings. 

Sometimes we can become impatient with our suffering if it continues for a long time. We feel as if we have been experiencing painful feelings for so long we simply can’t take it anymore, and so are suffering compounds over time. We then strongly wish that our painful feelings would go away. This suffering comes from a non-acceptance of our painful feelings. Just because we have suffered in the past does not mean we somehow have an exemption to the laws of samsara where all experiences are the nature of suffering. Indeed, we can use the fact that suffering is relentless within samsara to increase our renunciation, or the determination to once and for all escape from samsara.

Temporarily though, if we want our suffering to decrease, we need to accept the painful feelings that we are experiencing. There are all sorts of different methods we can use to do so explained in the lojong teachings. I have a friend who has fibromyalgia. She wrote Geshe-la asking for advice of what to do, and he told her to study and meditate on the chapter on ultimate bodhicitta in Eight Steps to Happiness. The essential point is painful feelings do not exist from their own side. They arise in dependence upon internal causes and conditions, namely grasping at both our body, our self, and the painful feelings. If we can realize that our self, our body, and the painful feelings are all equally empty then the pain quite literally goes away.  The meditation on emptiness is the ultimate pain reliever.  Just as we go looking for our body or our I in an emptiness meditation, so too we can also go looking for the pain we experience in our body. Where exactly is the pain? We can perform the exact same meditation of looking in the parts, in the collection of the parts, or separate from the parts to identify the emptiness of our painful feelings. When we do so, the pain disappears. In the dharmakaya, or truth body of Buddha, there is no pain. The only reason why we experience pain is because we are still grasping at our i’s being one with a samsaric body.

So you understand why painful feelings, if they are truly existent, can never be changed.