In Buddhism, there is the suffering due to ignorance. What do you call the suffering inflicted due to one’s gaining knowledge or enlightenment?

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If there’s a Sanskrit or Pali word for it, I don’t know it. But what you’re talking about is the realization of suffering due to decreased resistance to it. Awakening experiences don’t cause suffering. The suffering was always there, but you’d learned to distract yourself from it.

Distraction, resistance, clinging, repression, and suppression are survival techniques we start learning in childhood and become experts at as we age. Most of this defensive work is taken over by unconscious processes. Put simply, if you’re crying all day, you won’t get much work done. So you learn to have a stiff upper lip.

On the path to awakening and post-awakening, we learn to drop defense mechanisms. More and more, we stop clinging; we let our guard down; we let go. And we start feeling all the feelings that have been pent up. This can be overwhelming. But those feelings were already present. We’re just seeing and experiencing them clearly.

This is true for all kinds of things. A more mundane example is breathing. A basic meditation practice trains one to observe the breath very closely. Over a long period of practice, one learns to notice tiny nuances of the breathing process one wasn’t aware of before. But those nuances were always there. Still, if you’re constantly thinking about your breathing, noticing every tiny detail of each inhale and exhale, you won’t be able to work; you won’t be able to have a conversation … So our brains usually mask this awareness from us. It’s repressed.

When we get good enough at meditation to experience what we’re been repressing—when we gain that experiential knowledge (which is what “knowledge” means in Buddhism—it’s not intellectual; it’s felt), no new aspects of breathing have been created. Breathing is the same as it’s always been. It’s just our conscious awareness of it that has changed. Same our awareness of suffering.

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