What kinds of painful or unpleasant experiences and sensations do you deliberately push yourself into, in order to hopefully transcend beyond? I believe the impulse to push and transcend through things like this is a deep thread in the mind, a causal phenomenon creating or orchestrating outcomes surreptitiously in order to grow these possibilities. Nietzsche called this deep impulse the will to power, among other things as he understood WTP. A primal force, something striving to ‘overcome’. What is overcome, pleasures or pains? Mostly the latter.
I notice that I often do things I later regret, but then still later after that I realize how I have gotten over it and risen above those regretful or embarrassed/worried feelings. Parts of my mind or emotions harden against it, I gain new degrees of freedom. Which usually means that I refine my actions in order to avoid doing exactly the same things, but instead continue those actions in more precisely vectored ways. This achieves a couple of things, 1) it narrows lines of attack or approach asymptotically closer to the relevant truths, making them more invulnerable, and 2) it avoids and also justifies those past feelings of guilt/shame/anxiety. That is when I realize how those feelings were a driving force of realization pushing me to the later refinements.
I suppose this is a bit analogous to weigh lifting. You force your muscles to bear the stress of heavy things that cause the muscle fibers to tear. Then later those same muscle fibers heal back up and become even more extensive and closely knit. Only you shouldn’t actually experience pain while working out, physically anyway. So is the analogous “mental or emotional working out” the same, is pain really a sign to stop doing it?
In all honesty I am not sure. I can see it from both sides. I think for some people and/or in some situations it would be correct to say that the pain of the mental or emotional experience is indeed a sign of “hey this is bad, don’t do that again” and simply indicates a need to avoid. However, I can also see how these pains are sitting atop something else, other layers of meaning and causality that are tectonically linked upward into physical behaviors and our awareness of consequences as well as proprioceptive self-awareness of our bodies and minds, the whole apparatus of what we call feelings from the more baseline physiological changes which in sum lead to the subjective experience of those feelings qua feeling, or qua emotionality (emotions per se are a bit trickier because more complex and layered into/through meaning as quasi-phenomenological entities, but I digress. The point still stands here regardless).
So which path or method do you prefer? Do you merely avoid experiences of psychological pain, what I might call the good and ethically healthy approach, or do you find yourself somehow drawn into doing things or being in situations that lead to these sort of painful experiences over and over and in such ways as YOU yourself are experienced as the cause of this, therefore the associated pain is self-located and generates certain kinds of feelings (guilt, shame, anger, anxiety, regret, loss, sadness, loneliness, etc. etc.)? What kinds of psychological pains do you most often experience and how do you tolerate them? This is a primarily philosophical question considering the nature of the self, subjectivity and phenomenological meaning embedded in, through and as the partial physiological templates and accumulated organic changes-responses that constitute that given part of the underlying framework of what we come to think of and experience as our ‘consciousness’ or sense of self/personal life and being/“I”. At least on the level of the sensate or even qualitative, qualia-based distillations of the various meanings which we experience in our more raw or immediate/unmediated moments of awareness. Sort of like the average-everydayness or normalcy-trending/normalcy-tracking concept that some philosophers like to use.
