Many participants of various spiritual/religious movements tend to deemphasize the pain that one can experience irrespective of their attachment or detachment to the permutations of meaning the mind and other faculties create. In many ways, there's an idea that full realization or surrender is better because at the end of it, it can only give you peace and joy.

Well, while spiritual and physical peace and joy isn't something I'd run away from, the constant focus on these aspects are unsettling to me, for lack of a better term. It's like staring into the empty eyes of someone who has nothing but positive promises to give you, and you know better.

Given "my" experiences and understanding of suffering such as completely losing grip over one's mind, societal backlash, familial upheaval, sexual assault etc., it didn't sit right to me that true realization was framed as an escape hatch for all these experiences.

Of course, if you want to get people to be intrigued by your practice and gain deeper understanding, you don't lead with "The most brutal pain is also God", but hearing and understanding this made/makes me feel more comfortable in a sense. I've only heard people who describe themselves as Kashmir Shaivist discuss this.

I am far from a master or highly knowledgeable, but it seems to me that if you can commit yourself to renunciation and God centeredness with the knowledge that it's not guaranteed to produce anything "better" (better in so far as our human minds imagine it), this is the way to be. Of course, truth is always better than unwitting participation in ignorance, so it's technically always going to be "better", even if you don't experience it that way.

I suppose, in many ways this was what Krishna discussed in the Gita with performing duties properly with no attachments to the result, and what many spiritual teachers refer to when they delineate between pain and suffering. But, they still frame it in a way that deemphasizes pain, at least to me and from my understanding and perspectives.

What do you think?