The Rains Method

PRACTICE 7: RAINS INSIGHT

UNDERSTANDING SUFFERING

UNDERSTANDING PAIN

Jes Rains

May 2026

© 2026 The Rains Method

TABLE OF CONTENTS

  1. Sense Contact
  2. Sensation
  3. Perception
  4. Like vs Dislike
  5. Action
  6. Reaction
  7. Repeat (Sense Contact)

WHY UNDERSTAND PAIN?

We lose money, and pain follows.  We lose love, and pain follows.  We lose fame, pain follows, we lose objects, pain follows.  

We gain, and pleasure follows.  This pleasure of gain is exactly the fuel for the pain of loss.

Almost all of this pain is unnecessary.  It is “made up.”  Breaking your leg produces pain, worrying that you will be broke and unlovable is the specific pain known as suffering.

For every leaf of human pain, there is an endless forest of leaves of suffering.

Humanity has resigned itself to sleepwalker through life, hypnotized by tokens of gain and loss that exist absolutely nowhere in the world except our heads.  The result is the lonely, loveless, under performing life that to some extent we all live.  The Rains Method shows that love, companionship, and excellence are all things within our grasp.  The counterintuitive fact is that love and power do not come from grabbing onto the things we want, they come from letting go of the things we have.  

The Rains Method is the process of purifying ourselves from suffering based on seven practices that ensure that we let go in the core areas of our lives: understanding the world, acting within the world, and meditating towards this world.

The sole purpose of the Rains Method is to constantly appreciate the perfection of this life, but this also means deeply understanding how this perfection is obscured.  One the one hand in the Rains Method, we are revealing life as-it-is, on the other we are removing our confusion, our suffering.  The Rains Method can be said to exist and be directed at only one goal: to end suffering.

So first we must understand suffering and how it is caused in detail.  I have given many talks about what suffering is, how it is caused, its severity, and how to end it.  It occurs to me that while my audience walks away somewhat closer to the truth.  I always feel that I am unable to communicate the force of the reality of suffering to my audience.  I am going to practice what I preach and accept that most likely, in this essay, I will be unable to impress the severity of suffering nor the urgency to end it.  I can be comfortable with this, even though it is the most important thing for humanity to understand, I have a supreme grasp on it, and there is no reason why it can’t be transmitted easily except that we are confused to begin with.

This essay will be useful in spelling out in detail how suffering, like a pizza made at a pizzarrea, is ordered, made, and delivered as the only major contributor to human misery.  We can call this the “Cycle of Suffering.”

THE CYCLE OF PAIN

I. SENSE CONTACT: OBJECTS, ORGANS, & GATES

We can start suffering with Sense Contact.  Sense contact is when a sense object (either external like a mozzarella stick or an internal thought or feeling like hunger) comes in contact with a sense organ.  We are now talking about five external sense organs: the eye, ear, tongue, nose, and skin.  The sixth sense organ is the mind, which has its own faculties of vision, hearing, tasting, smelling, feeling, and others.  

There is a point where the Sense Object contacts the Sense Organ.  That point we will call the Sense Gate.  It is the point where the sense object is no longer “out there” and is admitted into the being, ostensibly towards the secondary sense gate of the Mind.  All of this is consistent with modern science.  All of this will be necessary to understand suffering.

The process is simple.  Mozzarella sticks exist out of sight in the kitchen.  They arrive at our table and the electromagnetic radiation travels towards the eye, it falls upon the sense gate of the eye (say, the retina), which is the organ that “captures” the data of mozzarella sticks.  Yummy.

II. SENSATION

Now the electromagnetic data is “within” the perceiver, it undergoes transformation.  In the eye for example, rods and cones give electromagnetic radiation the quality of color.  The eye ball is a big nerve, and it actually modifies the lines and shapes of the images we see, mozzarella sticks, significantly in order to help us differentiate, identify, acquire, and avoid them.  Evolution.  This process of initial capture plus initial change is called sensation.  There are five kinds of external sensation: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.

Sensation actually changes the object a lot.  If we were to measure electromagnetic radiation with a device, and then measure it with our eyes during sensation, we would find that we are “processing” something very different from what is “out there.”

In other words, by the time the sense object crosses the threshold of the sense gate, it is different.  It is so different from its original out there form, that if we saw the sense object as it is, we would have absolutely no recognition or detect even the slightest resemblance to what we are sensing.  Sensation destroys the sense object.

The take home here is that as animals, and especially humans, what we get is never what we are given.  This is the first reason to stop crying and laughing over what we get.  It isn’t what there is!  This is also a great reason to be distrusting of yourself, because you’re reacting to a world you do not truly even see, let alone understand.  

This is true for all living things.  Living beings have sense organs which are strategically adapted to help them survive and reproduce not to see the world as it is.

Sensation doesn’t really terminate.  Instead it dies.  The moment sensation is born at the crossing of the sense gate, it ages, falls ill, and dies – just like everything in the world.

Sensation is more or less “cannabalized” by a new process.  Sensation is effectively “eaten” or weakened by a new process, and at some point somewhere close to the brain-end of the optic nerve in the case of vision, for example, sensation has passed away and perception is fully born, at which perception promptly begins the process of dying.

III. PERCEPTION

Sensation obliterates the original sense object.  It literally kills it, cremates it, and dusts mozzarella sticks with the ashes, feeding them to sharks… gone without a trace.

If we can say that sensation utterly annihilates the sense object, perception is far more violent and destructive of the sensation.   It is hard to express this supremely enough.  

It is as if there was an elephant, and I perceived the solar system (which was exactly as it is, except lacking elephants).  Any comparison between the Sense Contact with mozzarella sticks, sensation of them, and perception of them is ludicrous.  They have literally nothing to do with each other.  The contacted and sensed objects are dead the moment perception is born.

Again, you can see how strongly these realities advise against taking things too seriously.  The trophies and curses we love and fear the most are made up within the mind.  And we care about them precisely because we mistakenly believe they exist as sense objects “out there.”

The ability to know this is precisely what makes human beings noble in ways no other animal is.

Sensation is a bottom up process, it is triggered by the sense object.  Perception is a top down process, it develops from within the mind.

You sense mozzarella sticks as a bunch of light and olfactory sensation, you organize it in perception as something likable or hatable.  

In the case of mozzarella sticks the smell and sight will go a long way.  The conditioned experiences with mozzarella sticks as either good or traumatizing are going to work their way into the realm of perception.  Snakes and spiders are things that some people have an innate, unlearned fear of, for example.  Rapid, unpredicted, large sweeping movements (like a lion), too.  The innate animal reactions and hard wired conditioned responses more or less pound code into the sensation.  That pounding is perception.

Eventually the sensation gets pounded enough with learned and innate responses.  First it is identified: physical object, edible, five inches long, six in number, in a bed of red sauce. The identity then starts slowly shaping into value judgement.  The value the mind is working towards is I love it or I hate it.  Totally binary.  No in between.  This is where our evolutionary hardwiring and conditioning “attack” or saturate the sensation, working to code the identified thing as having value or being a threat.  

Mozzarella sticks were good before, they contact the nose as good, but they have a black spot that’s bad, but hunger is very great so it’s good.  With enough of these interpretations pounded onto the object (waaayyyy, wayyyyy before you’re aware of it) you develop a specific reaction.  For all things you perceive, you will either love it or hate it.  There is no in between.  In between happens when you are thinking about multiple things at once.

Very, very few people are ever aware of their uncontacted sense gates, sense contact, sensation, or perception.  Although these are very confused realms filled with distortion, the distortion that follows washes it all out to oblivion.  The irony of the modern human being is that we are completely oblivious of the world, and yet we are always upset about the state of the world.  The Rains Method offers relief from both sides of this predicament.

IV.  LIKE VS DISLIKE

It should be reviewed that by now in the process our minds have literally captured and killed reality three times over.  Reality was gone with the first blow.  By now we are literally dreaming.  Our love and hate of the world is painted upon an empty dream.  Joke’s on us.

Once perception is born upon the death of sensation, it begins immediately to die and give birth to a reaction of like vs dislike.  

This is where we “decide” we like the mozzarella sticks or dislike them.

Like means that there is attraction, Dislike means revolution.

Love and hate are the first emotions to be born out of this process, and they are unbelievably crude.  Nostalgia, en wi, bitterness, disdain, calm, romantic love, are all ultra-refined hybrids of love vs hate.  They are the binary code that furnishes the supreme library of emotions we are able to see for ourselves at the end of the process.

This is the point where suffering is introduced for the modern person, but let’s proceed with the “healthy animal” cycle of life.

V. REPETITION

  1. Action: What we love we take action to get; what we hate we take action to avoid
  2. Reaction: the sense objects are modified by our actions
  3. Repeat the process with Sense Contact

CONCLUSIONS

What is the purpose of this process?  According to modern science, “we” are complex multicellular organisms that have a molecular sequence inside us called DNA.  It is a scientific fact that all of our faculties, including eyes, ears, tongue, nose, and skin, as well as heart, emotions, thoughts, and mind, can be said to exist solely to make more of that molecular sequence called DNA, and to mix it with other DNA molecules so that those future DNA molecules will likewise survive and reproduce.  That is what you’re here for according to modern evolutionary biology, and the Rains Method takes that explanation as as good any.

So you can see the sense gates destroy reality, sensation destroys that reality, perception subsequently destroys that reality, and the destruction process is precisely refined to make you reproduce rather than enjoy your day.  In other words we are born crazy, and for absolutely no good purpose whatsoever, literally to copy molecules.  Joke’s on us.

You will and should see that everything you do is either motivated by survival and reproduction or is a perversion of those motivations.

The Rains Method is different, it’s about seeing through this whole veil of mist, and enjoying yourself within it.

REFLECTION

You should instantly be able to see what a terrible “deal” it is to be alive.  You are a molecule replicating machine, everything you contact you will either love and have to get or hate and have to avoid.  There’s no peace.  Furthermore you will try to get what you love and avoid what you hate (which is work), as you do this work you will come to love parts of the work and share other parts, which will spur you to change the way you work constantly.  So now you are working constantly, constantly experiencing pleasure and pain, and constantly working on your work, resulting in more pleasure and pain.  What’s worse: your body will not let you rest, because then you will not reproduce, so your standards of satisfaction are organically rising and falling to the exact tune of what keeps you working as hard as humanly possible to reproduce.  Sounds like slavery – and that is exactly what it is!  To a double helix molecule called DNA.

It gets even worse!  This process of love, hate, and eternally cracking whips is going on every moment of your life until you die.  It is unstoppable.  This is the pain that nothing, not even the Rains Method can remove from life.

The truly horrifying news is that this is called pain.  It isn’t suffering.  Suffering is when you take this whole evolutionary branding iron and set the whole world on fire.  That is called the cycle of suffering, we’ll get into that next time.  Suffering is infinitely more miserable than the pain and slavery I have just described, but the good news is that the Rains Method can beat it!  

THE CYCLE OF SUFFERING (PREVIEW)

  1. Sense Contact
  2. Sensation
  3. Perception
  4. Like vs Dislike
  5. Action
  6. Reaction
  7. Self, the birth of suffering
  8. Wanting vs hating
  9. Clinging
  1. Taking up the wanting as important 
  2. Mentally solidifying the want
  3. The “coming of age” of the want
  4. Becoming
  1. The clinging causes a reinforcement/elaboration on the self identity
  2. Identifying with the clung to object to create the “momentum” for future reinforcement of the self
  3. The birth of the necessity for a new you (that you must grow into) in order to get the clung to thing
  1. Birth
  2. When you are born into the envisioned iteration of a person you envisioned at Becoming
  1. Action
  2. Reaction
  3. Repetition (Sense Contact)