Introduction: Applied entry · On suffering: suffering is a real state-response and needs no qualification for comparison; only by not judging your own pain can you pass through it.
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If you walked into his study in Shenzhen, this is the scene you would see: a somewhat old desk, a lit screen, and beside it several books opened halfway—physics, neuroscience, philosophy. At the corner of the desk, sometimes, a bottle of wine half drunk. Outside the window is the night of Shenzhen, layer upon layer of lights glowing in the distance.
On the computer screen there are usually two kinds of things. One is an unfinished manuscript. The other is a rejection notice that was opened long ago but never closed.
I spent many sleepless nights at just such a desk.
Back then, my life had a contradiction I could hardly explain even to myself. Judged by basic survival conditions, I was not doing badly—no morning rush hour to catch, no fixed office to clock in at, time relatively free. Yet deep into the night, when I saw those formulaic replies on the screen—"does not meet the requirements for publication in this journal," "we suggest you submit elsewhere"—my chest would still slowly tighten.
That pain was not fierce. It was like a stone with no weight yet always pressing on the body. It would not bring a person down at once, but it made every breath slightly less complete.
I often asked myself: why do I clearly live a decent life, yet always feel that something is wrong?
I once felt ashamed of this pain. I told myself "contentment brings happiness," told myself "better than those above, better than those below." But "I ought to be happy" cannot cancel "I truly am in pain."
It took me a long time to admit: pain does not require a certificate of qualification. When pain appears, it means that something in my life system genuinely is happening. It does not necessarily prove that the world owes me, nor that I am more unfortunate than others—but it deserves to be understood, not humiliated.
So I stopped merely trying to drive the pain away. I began to study it. I read physics, wanting to know how the matter that composes the body actually exists; I read neuroscience, wanting to know how bodily reactions become sensation, memory, and consciousness; I read psychology and philosophy, wanting to know why people produce desire, meaning, and self.
At first, I only wanted to save myself. But the deeper I pursued, the more I found that what I faced was not merely a personal psychological problem. Behind it lay a deeper crack: how, exactly, do the material world and the spiritual world belong to the same world? This book is my attempt at this logic.
Have you ever had this moment—your living conditions are clearly not bad, yet you always feel something is wrong. The body is comfortable, but the spirit is anxious. In the daytime you don't think about it when busy; at deep night, that voice arrives on schedule: "In this life of mine, what, in the end, is it all for?"
You are not alone. At this very moment, on this planet, there are countless people like you. Someone prays in a church pew, someone sits cross-legged on a meditation cushion in a temple, someone in a rented room scrolls through a phone, stares blankly for a while, then scrolls to the next item. Their beliefs differ, but their pain is the same; their names differ, but their loneliness is the same; their questions differ, but the questioning itself is the same.
The answers to these questions point to a more fundamental pursuit: if spiritual activity has not broken free of material life, then through what process, exactly, does it develop from ordinary matter into sensation, memory, self, and creation?
What this book sets out to answer is precisely this mind-matter question. It sets out from a study, from a rejection letter, from a person sitting deep in the night asking "what is wrong with me," and pursues the question all the way to matter, life, consciousness, relationships, and civilization.
The core concept of this book is only one: reaction. It is the bridge that runs through matter and consciousness. An atom changing its state under interaction is a reaction; a cell sensing environmental change and adjusting its metabolism is a reaction; the brain recalling the past and projecting the future is also a reaction among different structures inside the system.
Not every reaction is consciousness, but all consciousness is an advanced form of organized reaction.
From this, the book displays a continuous lineage from matter to consciousness: physical reactivity—the most basic form in which a system changes state under interaction; structure-selective reaction—different structures producing different results from the same interaction; the self-maintaining reaction of life—organizing reactions to maintain one's own boundary and continuation; tropistic reaction—making change begin to appear as beneficial or harmful; sentient reaction—integrating multiple changes into holistic states such as bitterness, pleasure, tension, and safety; representational reaction—letting the past and objects not present continue to influence the system in internal form; generative reaction—letting the system reorganize existing structures to form new imaginations and possibilities; recursive reaction—letting the system take its own earlier states as objects of reaction once again; rational reaction—letting the system compare multiple directions, evaluate consequences, and suppress or reorganize current reactions.
This path let me see: human consciousness did not suddenly jump out of matter completely unrelated to it—it gradually formed along the organization, internalization, holistic integration, and recursification of reaction.
I observe my own body. When the skin has long been in a normal state, it is without sensation. It is like a calm lake surface, no ripples at all. Then someone punches me. The skin's nerve endings jump from "no force stimulus" to "strong stimulus"—the greater the force, the larger the impact and the waves of neural transmission. It is as if there is a sensor in the brain: the greater the impact, the more pain I feel.
Consciousness arises from difference. Without difference, there is no sensation. All senses operate in one common mode: adapt to the environment and enter a non-sensate equilibrium; be broken, and difference arises; the size of the difference determines the intensity of the feeling.
I organize this understanding into a coordinate system: non-sensation is the origin, and bitterness and pleasure are two opposite directions. Any sense, when in a healthy state for a long time, is in an equilibrium without sensation. Once a difference appears, the system deviates from the origin: deviating in one direction is "bitterness"—pain, discomfort, disgust, fear; deviating in the other is "pleasure"—comfort, delight, liking, longing. How far the deviation goes is the intensity of the feeling—I call it "magnitude of sensation." Eating one grain of salt is slightly salty; eating a handful of salt is very salty—the magnitudes of impact differ, so the magnitudes of feeling differ.
The bitterness and pleasure of the body are determined mainly by the physical or chemical intensity of the stimulus. The bitterness and pleasure of the spirit, however, depend not only on "the thing itself" but also on the gap between the thing and my desire.
I am very poor and urgently need one hundred thousand yuan. The boss says: bonuses will be paid tomorrow. This news gives rise to expectation—I expect to receive one hundred thousand yuan. The next day, the bonus arrives: only forty thousand. Although forty thousand is also a substantial sum, I am not happy. Because my desire was one hundred thousand, but I actually received forty thousand—the gap is too large; expectation has been offset.
The intensity of spiritual feeling depends on the gap between "what is actually obtained" and "what is desired." This also explains why the same good thing produces completely different feelings in different people—because their desires differ. A person who lacks nothing may give a faint smile to a forty-thousand-yuan bonus; a person in dire need of money may weep with joy at forty thousand.
Feeling is not an objective property of things. It is the result of a thing entering a concrete life system and interacting with the desire structure already present in that system.
I distinguish three levels within human consciousness.
The bodily-sensation field—the holistic level formed by the body's internal states, sensory inputs, and basic regulation; its subjective presentation is bodily-sensation consciousness. It cares about whether life can be maintained: is energy sufficient? Is the body injured? Is the environment safe? Its language is direct: hungry, want to eat; in pain, want to flee; drowsy, want to sleep.
The emotional field—the holistic level of reaction formed after bodily states are reorganized through memory, object relationships, and evaluation of meaning. Fear is not only a racing heart; it also means: I understand this object as a threat. Shame is not only a hot face and a shrinking body; it also means: I believe I have lost value in the eyes of others. Loneliness is not only one person alone in a room; it means: the understanding and response I expected have not appeared.
The rational field—the level of reaction capable of observing, comparing, modeling, evaluating, and regulating. The most distinctive thing about the rational field is that it can hold multiple possibilities at once. The bodily-sensation field says "I am tired," the emotional field says "I cannot fail again," and the rational field can ask: do I truly need rest, or am I only avoiding beginning?
I once believed that reason creates pain because it is hijacked by emotion—fear appears first, reason hunts for evidence afterward. Later, observing more deeply, I discovered that even without intense emotion, as long as reason keeps operating, a structural crack is exposed. This is not that it "was used wrongly," but a gap inevitably produced when it "operates according to its nature."
The first crack lies between language and fact. Reason uses language as its tool, but language has never been a fully transparent mirror. I say "I will complete it as soon as possible"; what the other person hears may be "in three days," or "next week." That "as soon as possible" is semantically legitimate yet factually insufficient.
The second crack lies between the closedness of logic and the openness of reality. Reason loves consistency. As long as the premises of an inference are correct and the derivation conforms to the rules, the conclusion necessarily holds. But the real world does not obey this closedness. A newcomer at work reasons: "I work hard → excellent performance → I deserve promotion." The logic is entirely self-consistent, but in reality promotion also depends on quotas, the superior's preferences, and adjustments in corporate strategy—variables that were never included in the inference.
The third crack lies between advanced forms of thinking and the properties of the object. Comprehensive thinking presupposes that "grasping things in multiple dimensions is correct," but in reality a person may only need to focus on one or two key variables at a certain stage; the temporary imperfection of other dimensions is a normal feature.
These three cracks are not malfunctions. They are the inevitable products of reason operating according to its nature. And the true secret of internal friction lies in this: the crack needs to be activated—and desire is that key.
The same behavior can fall into four directions at once:
Private good: directed at oneself, and maintaining oneself. I organize my thoughts through writing, expand my cognition, and confirm myself.
Private evil: directed at oneself, but damaging oneself. I stay up late writing for long stretches, judge all my worth by publication results, and keep humiliating myself after rejections.
Public good: directed at others, and supporting others. My words may help another sleepless person understand himself.
Public evil: directed at others, but damaging others. I disparage other ways of thinking in order to prove my own theory correct.
The four quadrants are not fixed labels. They flow and transform among themselves. Excessive private good may slide into private evil; public good that oversteps its bounds may become public evil; private good can transform into public good—the abilities, resources, understanding, and stability a person gains through self-growth can better support others.
The threefold amplification of desire: instinctive desire points at the present, but reason extends desire from "now" to "the future," from "myself" to "more than others," and from "basic satisfaction" up to "the ideal self." This threefold amplification is not itself a sin; it drives humans to create civilization. But when reality cannot match the amplified desire, the cracks of reason are exposed.
I once understood freedom as: outside all causes, there exists an "I" influenced by nothing, which decides the next step out of thin air. But the more I thought about it, the harder it was to maintain. If a decision has no cause at all, why does it belong to me?
I gradually formed another understanding: freedom is not the absence of causes; it is that the system can bring the multiple causes affecting it into its internal reactions and participate in reorganizing how those causes act. A hand touching a hot source withdraws at once—the reaction path is very short. Whether a person continues a relationship, whether to quit a job, whether to keep writing—these summon more complex memory, emotion, values, and models of the future. The influences still exist, but the system is no longer pushed directly only by the present stimulus. It can place the past, the present, and the future in the same internal space for comparison, and it can produce a second reaction to its first reaction.
A person is not free by escaping causes but by being able to participate in causes—and it is through this that he gains finite freedom.
Obedience itself is neither good nor evil. It only says: some reaction has obtained an outlet into action.
Resistance does not delete a reaction from the system but adds a reaction in the opposite direction. The original fear is still there; now "I do not allow myself to fear" has been added. The first layer of pain is being afraid; the second layer is humiliating oneself for being afraid.
Transformation is not turning bad emotions into good ones, nor forcing oneself to think positively. It is: the system brings multiple conflicting reactions back into holistic evaluation and forms a new direction of action that did not directly appear before. The body says "stop," the emotion says "cannot stop." If you only choose between the two, you will either overdraw or come to a standstill. The genuinely valuable role of reason is to create a third option: "write only five hundred words today, save the progress, then rest." This option does not fully satisfy either side—the body does not get complete rest at once, the emotion does not finish the whole chapter—but both needs are partially included. The system has generated a new path from the conflict.
Language clearly has no weight, so why can it make the chest tighten? On the physical level, words are nothing but ink on paper or points of light on a screen, and speech is nothing but pressure waves in air. How does a physical existence become a feeling in another life system?
Step one, words or speech are the objectification of thinking. What a person is thinking becomes a physical existence in reality through words or speech. Step two, another subject interprets these symbols. The other person reads the words and cognizes them. He does not merely see symbols; he mobilizes his linguistic competence, cultural memory, and past experience. Step three, the interpretation triggers images in the mind. His brain begins to form pictures—a scene of a body being harmed, or of being cherished, being recognized. He has not actually experienced these, but his thinking is simulating them. Step four, the images in the mind transform into bodily reactions. The heart races, breathing quickens, palms sweat—or dopamine is released and the body relaxes. Step five, a good-natured or malignant consciousness forms. Anxiety, fear, anger—or happiness, pride, being cherished—these feelings appear. A sentence has, in this way, entered another person's life system.
Loneliness is not merely a matter of numbers. Loneliness is more likely to come from a mismatch: I hope some part of myself is seen, understood, or responded to, but the depth actually reachable in the relationship is insufficient. A person can have many friends. They eat together, chat, and amuse themselves. But if the matters he truly values have never been discussed, he will still be lonely.
Love is a subject's willingness to acknowledge, over the long term, the real existence of another subject, and, without canceling each other's subjectivity, to respond to, protect, regulate, and grow together. Love is not one intense emotion; it is action repeatedly formed in long-term relationships.
Understanding oneself does not equal being able to change oneself. I can explain the conflicts of body, emotion, and reason; I can analyze private good, private evil, public good, and public evil; I can discuss how freedom is generated from reactions. But at ten o'clock at night, the body still does not want to move, the emotion still fears failure, and reason still turns a small task into a verdict on one's whole life.
Field-state regulation has five processes:
Seeing—identifying the current state. Temporarily separating "the reaction occurring in my system" from "the external fact itself."
Acceptance—acknowledging that this reaction already exists, that it has its conditions of formation, and that I will no longer force it to disappear at once through humiliation. Acceptance concerns existence; boundaries concern action.
Interpretation—observing from multiple levels: the bodily-sensation level, the emotional level, the rational level, the environmental level. Distinguishing what is fact, what is interpretation, and what is prediction.
Intervention—changing one or more of the conditions under which the reaction continues to develop, so that the system can form a new subsequent state. Intervention can begin from the body, or from emotion, cognition, action, relationships, or environment.
Rhythm—letting the new reaction occur not only by chance but persist in time. The sustainability of life lies not in forever maintaining one state but in having a basic order among changes.
Why do I always feel I must keep proving my value? Why, after a period without results, do I feel I am being left behind by the world? Are these voices really created by me alone?
Institutional sediment of reactions: when a mode of reaction is repeated by a great many individuals and fixed through language, rules, and technology, it transforms from an individual field-state into an institutional field-state. Institutions are not something outside people—they are "collective memories" formed by the sedimentation of countless reactions.
The threefold dislocation of compressed modernization: education showed me infinite possibilities, but resources offered only a limited number of positions; the value system told me that whoever fails to reach those positions is a loser. These three legs are not in step, forming a perpetual dislocation.
The field-state structure of involution: bodily fatigue times emotional fear times rational calculation equals the more effort, the more anxiety. This is not a psychological problem of any individual; it is a field-state of the age manifesting at the individual level.
Reconciliation is not the permanent end of conflict but that, when conflict appears again, I no longer have to handle it only by negating myself.
Reconciling with the body: the body is not a prison blocking the spirit but the only real position where spirit can occur. I cannot depend on it to live while hating it for being finite.
Reconciling with aging: the finitude of life is not an accident that suddenly happens later; it has been a condition of life from the very beginning. Finitude is not the enemy of life's meaning; it also participates in generating meaning.
Reconciling with desire: allow yourself to acknowledge: I want. I hope to be loved. I hope for success. I hope to leave some trace. These wishes do not automatically make me vulgar. But after acknowledging desire, one must continue to judge: what does it demand of me? How will it affect myself and others? Does it have boundaries?
Reconciling with reason: mature reason does not only keep expanding; it also knows when to stop. Second-order reason lets me, when reason oversteps its bounds, gently press my own hand and say: "Enough, up to here. Leave the rest to time or action."
Reconciling with the past: acknowledging conditions does not cancel responsibility. But responsibility need not be borne by forever humiliating the past. The past cannot be modified, but how the past continues to function in the present can still change.
Reconciling with others: reconciliation can include leaving, including no longer explaining, including acknowledging that I cannot get the response I need from that person, and including, when necessary, protecting myself through law, institutions, and public support.
Reconciling with the world: accepting that the world is imperfect does not mean accepting that imperfection cannot be changed. I can do two things at once: acknowledge reality, and continue to push reality to change.
Pain Needs No Certificate is a core work in the "philosophy of mind-heart" module of Hua Guoping's system of thought, the key work leading from the theory of thinking and consciousness to the unity of mind and matter and reconciliation with life. The core questions it answers are: where does pain come from, how do matter and spirit become unified, how consciousness emerges from reaction, and how a person reconciles with himself within finitude.
Its direct theoretical foundations are three: On Thinking provides the core distinction "thinking is reflection; consciousness is reaction"; On the Evolution of Consciousness provides the theoretical foundation of the evolution of consciousness; On the Desires of Private Good provides the dynamic analysis of the four quadrants. In the coordinates of the system, The Pinnacle Concept establishes the origin—what a human being is; On Resolving Suffering answers on the practical level "how pain is to be resolved"; What If Living, What If Dying? answers "how to face death"; Why the World Can Unite and The Community of Shared Human Happiness extend individual awakening to the destiny of humanity.
If On Thinking is the "theoretical trunk" of the system, then Pain Needs No Certificate is a "philosophical branch" growing from that trunk toward reconciliation with life—it transforms abstract theories of thinking and consciousness into a life philosophy of understanding pain, accepting finitude, and reconciling with oneself.
If one final answer must be left for this book, I think it is not "field," not "reaction," not "consciousness," and certainly not some set of life techniques. The true answer may be:
A human being is a finite life system in the ceaseless movement of the world. He is shaped by matter, history, relationships, and civilization, and can also return to himself through consciousness and reorganize the next step within finite conditions.
We cannot avoid being influenced, but we can gradually understand the influence; we cannot eliminate all pain, but we can reduce the second injury inflicted upon pain; we cannot attain absolute freedom, but we can expand the space of choice; we cannot guarantee that goodwill is repaid, but we can still decide not to pass harm on to those weaker; we cannot make the world entirely just, but we can participate in building relationships and institutions that can be corrected; we cannot maintain balance forever, but we can find our own rhythm within change.
This is the field-state life as I understand it. It is not a completed state. It is a life process of ceaseless reaction, ceaseless adjustment, and ceaseless generation.
I am still swaying. But I am standing.
Introduction: Applied entry · On suffering: suffering is a real state-response and needs no qualification for comparison; only by not judging your own pain can you pass through it.