How are you doing, my friends? This time, I’m going to talk about pain. A heavy one, isn’t it?

Every creature seems to have pain from time to time and eventually dies. If the Creator existed in the first place, why did He or She create this mechanism of life and death? What purpose does pain serve? This is not only a philosophic question but also an empirical question.

Pain is ingrained in biology. As the most primitive form of biology, let’s take a microbe for example. A microbe has to eat to sustain its life. Hunger is a kind of pain, isn’t it? I suppose so. Hunger is painful and eating is pleasurable, right? Hunger motivates a microbe to move and find something to eat. So let’s say that pain creates movement. If pain doesn’t exist, everything will come to a halt. I think this is a fundamental understanding of pain.

Furthermore, as human beings, we have a subtler form of pain: boredom. When we are bored, we are motivated to know something, get emotional or intellectual stimulation. So eventually, we created highly charged civilizations.

We could say that most of us don’t like pain. We don’t like to suffer. So some scientists may look into eliminating pain from our DNA. If this attempt succeeded, what would happen next? We would get bored to death.

Some people think that there are only pleasure and pain in this world. An unhappy but realistic idea. The dynamic between pleasure and pain creates a sense of power in human society. We feel a sense of power when we get excited, right? In fact, some people get excited from pain. Some people use chemicals to get excited. Esoterically this is all about the first three chakras. We all have the animal nature or the survival instinct in a sense. Historically, we have been obsessed with the relation between master and servant for a very long time.

In this pitiful worldview, there’s no room for love, of course. Without any trace of unconditional love, we don’t think there is more than pleasure and pain, indeed. Concepts of the divine are bullshit for those who don’t know love. I don’t blame them. It is a difficult situation because love isn’t explainable in word.

Quite naturally, the lack of love leads to meaninglessness, psychological suffering and depression. Are we hopeless? Yes and no. This may sound ridiculous for some people, but I think that charity is very important. Beyond hypocrisy, the act of giving brings us back to our true nature that is love. Charity is a gradual process. We can practice giving and also receiving in families and relationships. So simple and obvious, yes?

OK, that’s all for today. Thank you for listening.