Byron Katie said: All suffering is mental. It has nothing to do with the body or with a person’s circumstances. You can be in great pain without any suffering at all.
Well, EMC, I for one would also find it very hard to defend what Byron Katie is saying.
Sometimes reading Byron Katie, I get the impression that she is saying that the root idea that something is not as it should be, is the source of suffering. If that's so, I don't buy it -- not literally anyway. I mean, what does that mean, on the face of it? Does it mean that pain can be entirely eliminated by removing such a root idea? I don't believe that in general it can. However, her methods can be useful to certain people at certain times.
If she had just said something like 'there are spiritual states in which the level of pain/suffering becomes very independent of physical circumstances', I would agree with her that far. If that's really what she means, I'm on board.
But the pain/suffering split is I believe actually just an odd semantic device masquerading as a philosophical principle. In normal definitions of pain, pain contains suffering by definition. If you split them definitionally, what have you done? What are you talking about?
If a person takes heroin or other strong opiates, they can experience strong 'pain' without suffering much -- that is, you could stick a pin in their finger and they wouldn't be very much bothered by it. So you can say they are then feeling pain without suffering, but another way of looking at it is that they have less pain. The opiate is a 'painkiller' and as such reduces the suffering. It is a suffering-killer, in another word.
Some spiritual states may create similar brain-states to the person on a strong opiate. That is, they suffer less --- their brain pain-kills --- or suffering-kills, which is the same thing in certain meanings of the word. It's certainly known that when a person is 'in love' for example, their brain releases pain-killing drugs. So they feel less pain. Byron Katie may have experienced or may be experiencing states such as that.
However, being in a state such as that has everything to do with the body. Not necessarily the observable state of the body, but the precise behavior of the nervous system -- the presence or not of an enlightened state. The business of deliberately letting go of the notion that things are not as they should be, may be a useful catalyst at certain times for the development of such a state. But it is not the be-all and end-all, and not a cure-all for the elimination of suffering.
>> In fact, I have never been! Torture, killings, mass murder, rape, incest, whatever. I don't raise an eyebrow. ... But animals... whoo.. that's another story! I can still not emotionally handle cruelty to animals. My simple question is: WHY?
I don't know why one bothers you more than the other. I can only say that I see human beings and animals both as animals. We are animals after all -- just a kind of ape. A clever kind of ape -- but there was a continuum of development from the other apes to us.