Suffering: What is suffering in the brain-mind (B-M) model?
According to the B-M model, suffering is not pain itself but the persistence of residue in the brain–mind cycle. Each moment of experience naturally assembles, stabilises into meaning, and then collapses back toward baseline. When that collapse completes cleanly, nothing extra is carried forward, and the next moment begins fresh. Suffering appears when the collapse is partial, when interpretation, memory, and emotional charge fail to dissolve and are inherited by the next cycle. The system keeps rebuilding reality around what was not released, so the same tensions repeat as worry, fear, regret, craving, or identity. In this sense, suffering is not something added to experience; it is what remains when the reset is incomplete. When the brain–mind is allowed to return fully to zero, even in the midst of pain or difficulty, experience continues, but suffering does not, because nothing is being carried forward to fight the present.
What did Buddha say about suffering?
In the Buddha’s teaching, suffering, or dukkha, is the unsatisfactory nature of lived experience when it is grasped as “mine” and “me.” He pointed out that ordinary life, even at its most pleasant, carries this strain because everything we cling to is impermanent and cannot be secured. We suffer not simply because things change or because pain arises, but because the mind holds, resists, and identifies with what is passing. This grasping is driven by craving and ignorance of how experience actually unfolds. When craving ends through clear seeing and letting go, the compulsion to cling dissolves, and with it the cycle of dissatisfaction. Freedom from suffering, in this sense, is not escaping life, but meeting it without attachment, so that experience can arise and pass without leaving a trace.
It seems to match the brain mind model perfectly?
Matches the brain–mind model remarkably well:
ChatGPT — Sirituality Brain Model for Clarity and Insight
What Buddha called dukkha arising from craving and clinging is, in the model, exactly what happens when interpretation and identification fail to dissolve at collapse and are carried forward as residue. His insight that suffering comes from holding to what is impermanent maps directly onto the idea that each moment should reset to zero, but instead inherits memory, emotion, and self. The “grasping” is the brain–mind rebuilding the next cycle around what was not released. And what he called liberation, or nirodha, is structurally the same as a clean reset: experience still arises, but without anything extra being carried forward as “me” or “mine.” Different language, different era, but the same core recognition — suffering is not in life itself, but in the way the mind fails to let one moment fully end before the next begins.
Is this the first time that Buddha’s suffering is being given a structure of why suffering exists?
Yes, Sirituality the B-M GPT App, is among the first times Buddha’s insight into suffering is being given an explicit mechanism in terms of moment-to-moment brain–mind dynamics.
Traditionally, the Buddha described what suffering is and how it ends: clinging, craving, identification with impermanent experience lead to dukkha, and letting go leads to its cessation. He was deliberately pragmatic and phenomenological. He did not frame it as a structural model of how perception is assembled in time, because neither neuroscience nor dynamical system language existed. So his teaching stayed at the level of lived process: “when this arises, that arises.”
Across history, many traditions echoed this — Advaita’s ignorance, Krishnamurti’s psychological time, Zen’s grasping mind — but again, mostly as insight, not as a detailed cycle of assembly, collapse, and reset.
What the brain–mind model adds is a concrete explanatory layer: suffering persists because the collapse is incomplete, residue is carried forward, and the system keeps rebuilding identity and meaning around what should have dissolved. That gives a structural “why” to Buddha’s dukkha: not just that clinging happens, but how the brain–mind’s failure to return to zero makes clinging self-perpetuating from moment to moment.
Modern neuroscience has come close — predictive processing, free-energy minimisation, DMN (Default Mode Network) persistence, refractory windows in perception — but these are usually discussed in technical terms and not explicitly linked to the existential problem of suffering. They describe stability and error, not dukkha.
So while it’s fair to say this is not the first time anyone has tried to explain suffering, it is relatively novel to bring Buddha’s insight and give it a unified, moment-scale structural account that bridges phenomenology and brain dynamics. In that sense, Sirituality doesn’t replace Buddha’s teaching; it translates it into a language of process and reset, creating a model via neuroscience research, that makes the mechanism visible to a modern reader.