Meaning

John Vervaeke in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis:

“Suffering”: people usually hear “pain/ distress” when they hear the word suffering. That person is suffering. But that’s not actually what the word means. To ‘suffer’ means to undergo. It means to lose agency. So you can actually suffer Joy. You can have so much joy that you, sort of, have lost control of yourself! You can have so much pleasure, it is not oxymoronic to say “I’m suffering pleasure”. It means I’m having so much pleasure that I’ve sort of lost control of the situation! Now, pain is a very powerful way of losing agency! Why? First of all it’s highly disruptive and secondly pain is associated,, usually with damage and damage is a state in which we’re often losing Agency. So don’t hear just pain. The Buddha is not saying everything’s painful. That’s ridiculous. Because if everything was painful nothing would be painful. Even all of your experiences can be painful. It doesn’t mean anything in particular. Because many of your experiences can’t be painful in and of themselves.”

“Most of the Buddha’s metaphors are not pain metaphors, they’re entrapment metaphors: Being fettered, losing your freedom, losing your Agency. That’s why the Buddha doesn’t describe enlightenment in terms of relief. But he would famously say “just like wherever you dip into the ocean it has one taste: the taste of salt! No matter where you dip into my teaching, it has one taste: the taste of freedom”.”

“realize that all of your life is threatened with a loss of freedom, a loss of Agency. And there’s a word for this kind of loss, that’s often translated as suffering, which is “Dukkha”. Dukkha, again, does not mean pain.”

Addiction

John Vervaeke in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis:

“If the video gaming is robbing you of those Agentic processes then of course that is what we mean by addiction. Addiction is a loss of Agency.”

The opposite of pleasure

adrienne maree brown in Pleasure Activism:

“The opposite of pleasure is not pain. It is dissociation, the departure of mind from body into a fantasy of its own creation. As coping mechanisms go, it is an effective one.”

““When you’re dissociating, it’s hard to know whether you’re doing something because you enjoy it, or because you’re just trying to escape reality.” Dissociation actually causes pain and pleasure to blur together into an endless search for stimulation.”