As part of a program I'm in, I was recently invited to answer a couple of deep questions about pain, purpose, and time. Here are the questions and my responses.
This question is a little complex. The vast majority of people don't have an adequate frame of reference for making sense of the nature of the pain I've experienced with cluster headaches. Quantifying it can help a little. According to this study:
A total of 1604 cluster headache respondents were included in the analysis. Respondents rated cluster headache as significantly more intense than every other pain condition examined. Cluster headache attacks were rated as 9.7 ± 0.6 (mean ± standard deviation) on the numerical rating scale, followed by labor pain (7.2 ± 2.0), pancreatitis (7.0 ± 1.5), and nephrolithiasis (6.9 ± 1.9).
In a physical sense, experiencing thousands of these headache attacks has put me in touch with dimensions of consciousness that very few people can access. These made it clear that my life has almost nothing to do with me, because nothing that could possibly happen would ever make me feel like being tortured repeatedly and having my life destroyed again and again by circumstances beyond my control was worthwhile. So if my life wasn't actually about me, I came to realize that it must instead be about other people. This fundamentally shifted my orientation, from what do I most want to how can I best serve.
The emotional and psychological pain associated with the condition is likewise hard to convey. Living in poverty, nearly starving to death at times, with society completely closed to me. Surrounded by people who treated me shabbily simply because their programming made them uncomfortable with my person and general situation. Asking for help again and again in a million different ways and receiving nothing in response, or receiving things that made my situation worse.
This pain ultimately refined my purpose in a surprising way. It forced me to create a life for myself that's largely outside of the status quo. It empowered me to get very clear about what my obligations to the people in my life really were and to otherwise completely disconnect from their reality. And it made it glaringly obvious that my only option for moving forward was to create a better world, because society as it was was totally broken. I was done with it and I wasn't going to kill myself, so all that was left was to work to transform it.
During a headache cluster, there are often months where I have just an hour or two each day to do all of life, with the rest of the time spent being tortured. This has taught me to act efficiently. But more than that, it taught me that time isn't necessarily what we're taught it is.
Experientially, time may feel like a space we inhabit, yet for me time came to be more like something I was with, rather than something I was in. Like time was a projection we projected onto sequences of events to organize our thinking about the relationships between these events. Our heartbeats keep time. So does our breathing and many other natural processes. Yet I'm not sure these things keep time at all. Maybe they instead are time, to the extent that we can experience time directly.
In a more practical sense, time is the only resource any individual really has. And how we use our attention is arguably the only choice we have in any given moment. So these two things, time and attention, are fundamental gifts of living. They're gifts we're all born with, and how we use these gifts is the only thing that's really up to us in our lives. Here is where the progresses of souls must necessarily be expressed. I'm not sure it gets holier than that.
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