Someone recently propounded the idea that a person's pain is unique and immeasurable.
By 'immeasurable', I think what was meant was 'unquantifiable' rather than 'infinite'. I think the second element, the notion that pain is unquantifiable, has a certain validity, in that one cannot precisely measure one's pain. More broadly, however: disturbance is disturbance, and quantity is both illusory and irrelevant. The fact that one is disturbed is what matters.
From ACIM:
'The anger may take the form of any reaction ranging from mild irritation to rage. The degree of the emotion you experience does not matter. You will become increasingly aware that a slight twinge of annoyance is nothing but a veil drawn over intense fury.'
And:
'Perhaps it will be helpful to remember that no one can be angry at a fact. It is always an interpretation that gives rise to negative emotions, regardless of their seeming justification by what appears as facts. Regardless, too, of the intensity of the anger that is aroused. It may be merely slight irritation, perhaps too mild to be even clearly recognized. Or it may also take the form of intense rage, accompanied by thoughts of violence, fantasied or apparently acted out. It does not matter. All of these reactions are the same. They obscure the truth, and this can never be a matter of degree. Either truth is apparent, or it is not. It cannot be partially recognized. Who is unaware of truth must look upon illusions.'
If I'm out of whack, I'm out of whack; if I'm in the zone, I'm in the zone; if I'm not in the zone, I'm not remotely in the zone. I'm somewhere else. If I'm distracted, I'm not there. I either heard what you said, or I didn't. I either saw the squirrel or I didn't. I'm experiencing either love or fear.
To repeat: quantity is both illusory and irrelevant.
What about uniqueness. Surely each of us has unique pain?
If one hundred people go to a grocery store, each will come out with a different array of goods, but the goods come from a finite range of possible goods.
The precise configuration of a person's circumstances, and the array of associated sufferings, may be unique, but no individual circumstance is substantively unique; no individual suffering is substantively unique. The uniqueness of the array belies the predictability and repetition of the constituent parts. Any constituent-level differences are trivial.
We're 99% the same as bonobos, genetically. Your spleen and my spleen do the same thing. Sure, there is the Wiberg classification of patellas, as people's patellas differ a little, but patellas are shared by all healthy humans and plenty of other species. Even echidnas. The similarities massively outweigh the differences.
The 'anatomy' of emotions is repeating and predictable. Particular beliefs, attitudes, thinking processes, and behaviours will generate particular emotions. No emotion is unique. No pain is unique. Particular physical injuries will give rise to particular forms of pain, and tests to elicit particular pains will tell you what is fractured, ruptured, or lesioned. The process with emotional pain is similar.
I thought I was 'special and different'. You weren't, but I was. I discovered I'm largely cohort, not outlier. That's why the solution that works for you works for me. That's why we can have common morality, common etiquette, shared experiences, identification, shared solutions: we're all in the ruck together. That's why, when you hear hundreds of step fives, you get a little bored, because it's the same thing over and over. A myriad of different people with different circumstances but with the same basic emotions caused by the same basic flaws in belief, thinking, and behaviour.
The myriad arrays of circumstances and configurations of emotions are thus reducible to the same building blocks, in the same way that the endless genetic variation on the planet is reducible to the same four base nucleotides in DNA. Adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T). What are our four base nucleotides? Resentment (R), selfishness (S), dishonesty (D), and fear (F). Fail to recognise this, and you've missed the whole show.
To quote Lama Zopa Rinpoche:
'We try to obtain the immediate happiness of this life through what are called the eight worldly dharmas: desire for comfort, material things (such as gifts, friends and so forth), a good reputation and praise, and aversion to lack of comfort and material things, a bad reputation and criticism, or blame.'
So the the intricate orchid of my personal suffering consists of nothing more than water, chlorophyll, pigmentation, hydrocarbons? The mysterious and terrifying forest of my psyche is no more than trees—just a hell of a lot of them, but trees nonetheless?
To quote Sondheim:
'I have no fear, nor no one should
The woods are just trees
The trees are just wood.'
The emotion is not coming from the circumstances. As Astrid says, and as I always quote, 'The calls are coming from within the house.'
So, what is the call that is coming from inside the house? Let's ask Ken Wapnick:
'Yet, for the insane reason of guilt we all share, we are still choosing to punish ourselves by reviewing mentally the nightmare illusions of the ego. And thus we continue to see a movie that makes us upset and brings us pain. We do this because of our identification with the ego thought system that teaches us that we have indeed established for ourselves a will and self that is separate from God. And once believing we have accomplished the impossible, we must believe that God has become the enemy who demands our punishment through pain and death.'
We, we, we. Not I. Not specialness. Not uniqueness. Fragments of a whole, each fragment responding in the same way to the fragmentation. A fragmentation that is imaginary and has not really taken place.
To quote Bernardo Kastrup:
'[I]dealism acknowledges that there is a world outside personal psyches, since personal psyches are but dissociated segments of a broader universal consciousness.'
Inside the illusion of uniqueness is despair.
Inside the truth of identification is hope.