Embodiment Without Consolation

Pain without a witness, presence without a supervisor

Pain is not a malfunction. Mortality is not a design flaw. Embodiment is the whole condition, the field in which anything appears at all. Living hurts, and that hurt has no explanation outside itself.

The common spiritual move—ancient or modern—is to claim that suffering hints at something beyond: purification, progress, karma, awakening, providence. Pain demands a method. The ache of embodiment is recast as a puzzle to be cracked. The human organism becomes a student who must learn correctly. The quest for consolation takes the place of direct contact.

But suffering does not instruct. It reports. It is the system registering that the organism is under pressure. Signals arise in flesh and nerves long before any narrative forms. The story arrives late and takes credit or blame for what it never caused.

At a certain point—more than forty years ago now—something in me stopped trying to arrange experience into a coherent narrative about a person who was supposed to be steering it. The tension simply ceased. That felt abrupt and dramatic at the time, but in retrospect, it was only clarity tightening, only the recognition that everything was already happening without a manager.

People call that shift awakening. I once used that word too. It misleads. It suggests an achievement or an identity built out of clarity. But no fresh ground replaced the lost ground. No refuge appeared. Experience simply kept happening. Nothing more.

Even now, when pain hits hard enough, some remnants of the old storyline flare up. The body recoils. Fear tightens the chest. Reflexively, a thought appears: I wish things could be different. In those moments, nothing is transcended. The body reacts first. Clarity catches up later. The flinch isn’t a failure. It’s part of the animal.

This is embodiment with no elsewhere. No witness hovering above the damage. No stand-in for control. Pain is the price we pay for being here at all. There’s no escape from that condition.

Presence is not a spiritual achievement. It is simply what remains when the attempt to be present dissolves. That is why I reject “presence” as a prescription. “Be present” sounds harmless, but it installs a supervisor, a subtle witness monitoring compliance. One tries to be in the moment and, in that effort, divides the singular moment into two: the experiencer and the experience.

Presence cannot be done. Awareness of the present moment cannot be willed. “Here now” is only what continues when the supervision stops.

Some will ask whether this understanding improves life. Only in this way: it undoes the double suffering of believing that pain should not exist or that someone should be managing it better. Without that additional strain, pain is just pain. Sorrow is just sorrow. Their intensity remains, but the humiliation of failure does not.

This is neither bleak nor fatalistic. It is simply unadorned. When consolation collapses, what remains is exactly what was happening all along: breath, sensation, thought, grief, relief, fatigue, hunger, aging—none of it directed by a self, none of it punishable, none of it rewarded. Just the ongoing exposure of a vulnerable body to a world that does not negotiate.

Embodiment hurts. The body recoils. The heart beats anyway. Breath comes whether the story approves or not. Nothing is waiting behind this. No payoff. This is it.

Books By Robert:
The Ten Thousand Things
Depending On No-Thing
Understanding Claude
The 21st Century Self