Pain is not a good thing.
Pain is not a teacher.
Pain is not healing.
Pain is not a blessing.
Pain is not love.
Pain is not sweet.
Pain is not inevitable.
When people talk about pain in positive terms like this:
Pain is a good thing.
Pain is a teacher.
Pain is healing.
Pain is a blessing.
Pain is love.
Pain is sweet.
Pain is inevitable.
They are not speaking about PAIN as something that comes without warning, without their own control. They are speaking about self-imposed pain. Self-mortification, self-flagellation. That is not PAIN, that is the self-centered and egotistical imitation of pain. Ultimately it’s an attempt to avoid pain.
Judaism has always held self-mortificators in low regard, as exactly that, self-centered and egotistical imitators and attention seekers.
Torah says about this:
“‘Now this is the law of the Nazirite when the days of his separation are fulfilled, he shall bring the offering to the doorway of the tent of meeting. 14 ‘He shall present his offering to the LORD: one male lamb a year old without defect for a burnt offering and one ewe-lamb a year old without defect for a sin offering and one ram without defect for a peace offering, 15 and a basket of unleavened cakes of fine flour mixed with oil and unleavened wafers spread with oil, along with their grain offering and their drink offering. 16 ‘Then the priest shall present them before the LORD and shall offer his sin offering and his burnt offering.”
Torah allows self-imposed mortifications (becoming a nazarite), but does at the same time consider the act in itself a sin for which the person needs to bring a sin-offering to be cleansed from.
People who seek pain as a teacher, healing, blessing etc, will learn nothing, heal nothing and get no blessing from it, because they are not seeking real pain, they are creating a controllable imitation of pain, which means that they have removed the one element of pain, emotional or physical, that makes pain into pain – powerlessness to make it stop.
This is akin to the self-victimizers who create situations, f.i online in discussion forums, where they are ‘victimized’ by others through being ‘misunderstood’, ‘ignored’ or ‘met by aggression’. The nature of the ‘misunderstanding’ or ‘aggression’ is always defined by the self-victimizer, and is seldom visible to an objective eye. They are ultimately in control of those situations, and are quite adept at manipulating the situations so that the victimizations are never specifically severe. Once they have had their ‘fix’ they leave the discussion or the Forum entirely, and are satisfied for a while, until they need their next ‘fix’, at which time they will come back and create a new situation in which they can be ‘victimized’ under controlled forms.
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