The question of unpleasant and dukkha is a perennial and understandable one.
The issues is this: pain exists for nearly all of us, except a few rare people who feel no pain at all due a genetic variant. I have actually met a child who had this, and their feet, hands, skin and bones in general did very poorly, as they simply couldn’t tell when they had hurt themselves.
So, there is still pain. Pain is still unpleasant, in that unpleasant is hard-wired to some degree in the nature of ordinary mammalian sensory apparatus.
Are the reactions to it different? Yes, but not entirely.
The differences are as follows, and in general terms:
1) Pain is in proportion spacially, meaning that the volume of experience that has the pain is just that much volume, as the wide-open mind doesn’t contract into the pain in the way it did. That is not the same as nothing being unpleasant, but there is a background of neutral to pleasant in which it sits that the mind doesn’t forget in the way it did before.
2) Mental reactions are different, though not entirely transformed. The different part has to do with mental proliferation around the pain, to the rapidity with which any mental proliferation around the pain vanishes as soon as the pain does, and the space that is around the mental proliferations that might arise. So, it is not that the mind might not think, “Oh, fuck, I stubbed my toe hard!”, as it might, but that thought, like all thought, is a small, ephemeral thing in open space, not something contracted into that becomes this huge blinding thing.
The similarities are as follows:
1) Enough pain can compromise the function of this mammal. For example, I have had somewhere around 13 kidney stones to date, some mild, some moderate, and some that caused a truly amazing amount of pain. Some women I have known who have had bad kidney stones and natural childbirth have told me that they at least are equal in how much pain they can produce, and a few have said that their worst kidney stones were worse than natural childbirth. Having had a few that were basically off the charts quantities of pain, I can believe them. When I am having one of those, I get nauseated, sweat, shake sometimes, want to move all over the place, and, on rare occasions, have felt like I might pass out from the pain simply pouring so much sensation into the poor mammals brain that it began to overload. Past a certain point, cognition becomes difficult, as it feels that all circuits get swamped by the sensations.
2) Pain produces some aversion to circumstances in which the pain occured proportional to how much pain was there. This seems some deep hard-wired mammalian protective response and makes great survival sense. The fact of severe pain causing conditioning to avoid those situations would not surprise the likes of B F Skinner, but it does surprise some idealists who imagine that someone might be able to have no deep, instinctual, mammalian, sympathetic nervous-system mediated, memory-based reactions to pain. Is the perception of those different? Yes, but they still occur. So, do I believe that conditions, such as PTSD, are still possible in the highly awakened? Yes, given sufficiently adverse circumstances.
So, is this way better? Definitely. Is it an entire solution to the fact of pain? No, not while a mammal who was born still lives. Consider the cases of Channa, the arahant monk from the Pali Canon who committed suicide due to some chronic pain that became to much for him to bear. Even the Buddha suffered from headaches and back pain, which the Pali Canon goes into detail about and the karma that produced those.
Long ago, and before I realized it would be such a hard text to find again, I read an account of the Buddha’s last days, in which he was in terrible pain from some intestinal illness (dysentery? mesenteric ischemia?). Anyway, whatever it was, in this account the Buddha said something like, “Though I attain to the highest jhanas I am able, I am not able to find relief from this suffering.” I have been searching for that version of his last days for two decades since I read it in some book on some Buddhist text reading shelf in India somewhere, and, should anyone know where it can be found, the reference would be much appreciated.
