A lot has been said about conclusive ignorance and the search for increased awareness and personal liberty through the recovery of knowing. All this is by way of converting unconsciousness ignorance of reality after having subscribed to it) into consciousness (awareness of the manifestation of one's own postulates in any reality).
But offering this significance will not by itself remedy the presence of pain; and understanding this also requires that the nature of pain itself be understood.
There is a possibility that just as there is a gradient of degrees of unconsciousness there is a comparable gradient of what constitutes pain. Levels of psychosis can be found frequently in our society in which awareness never lands on the appropriate object and response to a manifested reality is always out of touch with the actual nature of that reality.
Similarly, exploring the hearts of psychotics one cannot flinch from the floods of burning and scarring pain that lurk therein, if one wishes to understand their consequences. To a heart which has been over-abused the very existence of other people is a danger best buried beneath a solid cloud of ignoral. Denial is a good solution toward those factors which are identified (whether rightly or not) with suffering and pain. When one does this he can easily turn off certain frequencies of pain and believe in a solider, denser spectrum of things.
Unfortunately he usually discovers that a new and different set of pains awaits him there. Thus the man who turns off all emotion finds himself clutching at his chest or doubling over with a vicious nervous stab of pain running from his lower back into his stomach, for example. Rather than feel the overwhelming fury of loss which accompanied his divorce, he wrestles with the acid burn of peptic ulcers or the black drumming murder of the migraine.
At one level of consciousness, all pain can be identified in terms of physical sense. This does not mean these kinds of pain are the only ones around, any more than physical mathematics is the only system of 'science' around. But it gets to the point where nothing else will register through the burden involved.
There are several known levels of pain which constitute a sort of inverted scale, like a pyramid pointing south. At the top of the pyramid, force and pain in the body can be felt as force and pain without complete shutdown. Below that level intense emotions of a low sort constitute pain, and a being refuses to admit these creations into his viewed spectrum: anger, fear and grief are intolerably painful in their original nature and can only be acknowledged to exist if they have been safely filtered into significance.
Thus a person at one level will only seriously collapse when hit hard with physical body pain; at a lower level, a shock or a loss will cave them in. Below that, a minor confusion or transient upset or social invalidation will stop them in their tracks and the entire environment will have to be watched cautiously.
These are known levels of what constitutes pain on the dwindling spiral of being through human forms. But what constitutes pain to someone who can handle the raw force of breaking a leg without turning it off or who can confront dentistry without anesthesia because they have so high an ability to feel?
One answer is just greater volumes of the same -- torture or complete incineration.
People who have resolved their 'normal' engrams -- legs broken and bodies volatized in ray-beams, etc. -- find themselves confronting huge incidents of electronic overwhelm, being slapped silly with electric force and having taped viewpoints laced into your identity guaranteed to make a dumb citizen out of YOU. Pain, to be sure -- the kind that takes the very anchors of your being and spins them into a chaos of protest, fighting back and losing, suffering the insufferable, and being swept along in spite of every ounce of resistance one can muster.
Exposed to this kind of treatment a being becomes the tormentor, the shock, having no choice left about being himself. Surely, the primary ingredient of pain is the loss of the right to be oneself; the world says thou shalt not be and forces itself over you like a red-hot blanket. This denial of very Being is the core of all pain far above any power of the physical universe to hurt on electrical channels.
Pain itself is something that locks unto unconsciousness. In the absence of unconsciousness pain would not exist. The creation of unconsciousness, therefore, is a pre-requisite for any vulnerability to pain. Once a spot of invisible 'No Consciousness' exists a being can be slammed around six ways from amidships. It isn't the pain of an implant or an engram that makes a problem. It is the yo-yo of create and avoid that comes into play when a being has created a place of knowing, and then decided that he abhors it! Thus even the most other-determined sorrow or excruciating torture draws its power, like the lights of a dirty city, from a central Niagara of energy. Generated by Source 'flip-flopping' itself between Know and Know-Not, these torrents of particles are sprayed out from the distortions of Ground, shed by bucketful's like sparks from a grinding wheel. There is the image of Source creating itself into all conditions of suffering and sadness -- the high-energy galloping retreat and approach between Knowing and a created Unknown.
How much Know does it take to make an Unknown? About twice as much.