A question about suffering

rugadd wrote: Can you expand on your #1 Steam? I choose to do my exercises and I feel I grow stronger from them.

Or am I confusing pain with suffering?

Pain and suffering are not the same, I don't think. I can't articulate the difference at the moment, but I definitely feel there is one.

I feel like pain is the raw feeling. Whereas suffering is something that most associate as being unjust or punishment or as a means to end or something like that.

Suffering sounds like something almost to much to bare , i think whatever path you are on , sufferring should not be a part of it ,

Trials are my favourite really , the testing of your boundaries and the building up of strenght to endure , suffering sounds like something you could do without .. but having said that , there is beauty in suffering , but still i like to call it enduring ...and for me passion is a beatifull way of suffering

1) Are they the same kinds of suffering?

The Yodaism could be about the projection and transfer of internal conflict outwards specifically, such that it might serve as a warning to be careless with ones own inability to resolve ones own innate power effectively. The other one is probably just the reality that we contextualize new experience against old experience and how that relativity plays into our innate curiosity which might cause a baseline familiarity and resultant tendency to devalue it. When that happens to our own experience of self then we might have a tendency to cling to various forms of suffering and quick fix rewards to compensate. But then we have religious and spiritual traditions which work on alleviating that for the self as much as possible, which then seems to highlite it's existence in others!

3) If they are the same suffering, and/or no degrees of suffering are different enough from each other to be considered separately, does that mean that it is necessary to encounter--perhaps even participate in--the dark side in order to fully understand the force, or the light side of the force?

Depends on what you mean by the dark side and of the Force. I wouldn't say suffering or pain is necessarily counterproductive to ones growth but rather exerting those things onto others more likely would be. In short I define passion closely to 'self sacrifice', as Khaos said 'to suffer', and then I also define emotion closely to 'sacrifice' more broadly. Such that passion can only be individual, but emotion can be shared, and passion is an emotion but emotion is not necessarily passion. So in the same way, experiencing pain or suffering to oneself by oneself (direct) might be better seen as functionally distinct from additionally causing pain or suffering (indirect) to something else. So while 'passion' can mean a lot of different things.... if in this context of sacrificing part of oneself for some progress then its not limited to dark or Sith paths IMO necessarily.

I guess suffering most practically is how one handles the experience of discomfort, with pain being one type of discomfort!?