Existential problems causing pain are problems that existence poses before us like anger, boredom, insecurity, anxiety, low self-esteem, etc.

They are not there due to any of our actions.

Neither are they accidental.

They are there as we are here.

They are because we are.

In fact, they are inseparable from our existence as human beings.

Still they trouble us a lot. Can we do anything about them?

Let us investigate.

Pain, in itself, is an unpleasant tactile sensation.

We have a tendency to fight it back, to forget it, to avoid it, and to brood over it.

In the process, we accentuate it.

We dread it like dreading a monster.

But it seems to love feasting on us, reducing us to the helpless creatures in its clutches.

What generates it?

Is it an extreme pressure or an injury to the nerve-endings, which makes it felt?

Is it a mechanism to get alert, thus avoiding a fatal injury before it takes place?

Yes and no!

Some people are very apprehensive of it even when there is no physically fatal danger involved, whereas others do not care much about it.

This may be because of various reasons, some biological but mostly mental - the sensitivities, the dread, the avoidance, the rejection, the insensitivity, and the habit!

If it were only an objective biological mechanism, such subjective reactions would not have been present.

It is more a mental reaction to a biological stimulation.

The mind compares the two states - the pain and the pleasure; rejects the former and accepts the latter!

This mental comparison and rejection is its basic etiology, which yields to all sorts of aches in the body and the mind.

The mind itself, which is nothing but the emotional residue of the past, generates and feels the ache.

If the mind stops, ache stops too.

By qualification, G B Singh is an electronics engineer, passionate to change the quality of life on earth.