Hard Frost

Da bern

I find it hard to remember what it is like to not have pain.

I'm not sure whether I cannot remember or whether I think I can not remember painlessness. I have times when I do not think I have pain, but if I ask myself "Am I in a painless state?" I find that I do have pain but that it is diminished. I regard pain as a constant companion that sometimes visits me with intensity and other times it rests. Even so I have found at times that I do experience moments when everything in the universe is in its place. Maybe this is happiness. This has not been common but it has happened recently. I am able to say to myself at these times: "I am not living in pain right now." I tend not to find this deep universal mellowness if I am in pain.

Pain may be like emotional states which seem to have a powerful effect on memory. We tend to remember times when we were in the identical emotional state when we are aware of strong feelings. So moving from an awareness of one state of mind with strong emotions to another requires that we forget emotional nuances at work on our awareness.
This is one reason why electric shock therapy works for some people who are clinically depressed.

There is a tendency for the human mind to "colour" our experiences or at least our memories of our experiences according to the emotional catagory we are in at a particular time. Intense emotions makes the colouring even stronger. We have coloured memory and multiple levels of coloured memory in our personal stories. Once the coloured expereince is in our personal stories it can become an aspect of our self identity. It becomes a belief we hold about ourselves. Emotions do not always blind us to the realities of the world but they are a powerful predictor of what we choose to see. Human beings are subjective beings who seem to need beliefs.

I know that pain also colours my own experiences as well as my memory of experiences. I, to some extent, believe that I am someone different when I am in pain compared to when I am happy. I am not better or worse in either case but I experience less difficulty when I am happy.

Some time later, in another post, I may postulate why chronic pain does have meaning.