"Huh. And - a sense of delight and power from the fact that this is happening and you're enduring it and the thing you are is untouchable by it?"

"Nnnnooooope."

"Nooooot even slightly."

"That's, like, somebody who's not a Keeper but who has a lot more 'dignity' than I do, seeing evidence that... say specifically a 'startup founder' realizing their brilliant company is inevitably failing?  Updating and throwing away one of their most cherished hopes?  A kind of awfulness that means something, that you want to not look away from because the details are part of reality and your pride is to accept reality whatever that is, and where the unpleasantness is part of the process of you becoming a different and better person; and to update correctly in the face of that is your skill and your art and your mastery, which you would execute correctly even if everything else was turning to ash around you."

"I cannot say that I have ever in my life heard it suggested that anybody would want to relate to physical pain that way.  It's something you'd want to experience as little as possible.  The details of it are the last thing you want.  If you were paying attention to it, it would be so you could do the thing where you pay a lot of attention to an emotion and question what it means and look at the perception in so much detail that you've killed the emotion, which, to be clear, is something that's generally considered a hazardous thing to do to one of your emotions."

" - so, uh, it might be that this is a fundamental difference between dath ilani and Chelish people, but when you say that the first thing I jump to is actually just that dath ilani are wrong about this and missing out."

"Preeeettty sure it's that fundamental difference one."

"If you can choose how you relate to things at all, even a little, with practice, I don't see why you wouldn't relate to physical pain that way. Not seek it out, maybe, but have the skill to relate to it in that fashion when it comes up."

"I'm not sure I can.  It feels like a 'type-error'.  It's pretty easy to imagine - the direction I'd have to move in, even if for now I've chosen not to go there, to become somebody who could burn his current personality to ash by borrowing Asmodia's headband for an hour, and take pride in his 'dignity' for accepting the hurt and updating."

"Doing that with pain?  I don't - know what series of mental changes I'd even try, to do that, regardless of whether or not I want to."

"Physical pain doesn't mean things the way that thoughts do."

"Sure, but the way I relate to it does mean things, and pain as I experience it is - a combination of whatever raw input I'm getting and how I'm relating to it."

"I'd definitely have been proud of myself if I'd been able to run through ten minutes holding Detect Magic on my first try.  I'm thinking that you mean something else, by all this, but I want to check to make sure I'm not in fact overcomplicating things and missing something that's supposed to be very simple and obvious."

That is not what she means!! What she means is that suffering is a fundamental part of the human experience and that relating to it with strength and joy and satisfaction feels about as basic and fundamental as being able to relate to anything else that way! But she's not sure she should say that!

"That's not the thing, no. I mean, that is very satisfying, achieving something despite it being painful, but I mean - something you can do even if you, I don't know, accidentally injure yourself by walking into a table. Just orienting to that experience as something - like a startup founder getting bad news - it really seems to me like something anyone ought to be able to do -"

"Well, any sex worker in Civilization who can do that - even if she's not sexually aroused by the pain, so long as she's - present, participating, doesn't hate it, isn't just enduring it for money, if it means something to her that isn't negative and doesn't completely trash the rest of sex - is no doubt very very very rich."

"- I wonder if this explains the Good people who hate Hell, if they're - like you that way, and assuming everyone is like them -"

"In Baseline, 'typical-mind fallacy'.  We got training in not doing that, not assuming everyone else was like ourselves.  So presumably everybody in Golarion by default runs off and assumes everyone else's brain works like their own."

" - yep, that sounds about right." But it's a pretty big problem how Hell is where everyone should go.

"Think I'll try attaching the stone to my arm again, just to see if I can possibly do your thing even though it seems like I obviously can't."

" - huh. I really hope that works."

"97% it won't, but don't worry, we get training in being able to do things without being influenced by our belief we can't do them.  Don't suppose it counts by the way if I'm also doing this out of my masculine 'gendertrope', and to prove that the pain isn't able to drive me away from doing this again."

"Maybe? If the way you related to pain was having as part of your gendertrope that you are tough and pain is irrelevant to you, it can't touch the thing that you are, that'd be - closer to where I am than the thing you just described."

"Just the tough part.  I expect that pain in sufficient quantities can touch the thing that I am, break it or erase it in the flood of negative 'feedback', 'neural-circuits' being 'neural-trained' out of existence by the constant enormous 'error-signal' everything gets."

"What I'm proving is that this quantity of pain is not that amount.  There's a saying out of dath ilan, 'I have a price, but I'm not cheap.'"

"Now quiet a moment while I actually try this, I want to concentrate."

Obedient quiet Carissa!

(It can't possibly be this easy but it would be really nice, if it could.)

Keltham puts the stone on his arm, dissociating from the part of himself that wants to flinch and destroying-by-reflection the fear of just that action itself which is not itself the pain.

He waits until his brain understands that the stone itself is not the pain.

He tries to put himself into the frame of mind of somebody who relates to the coming pain as if that were dignity, as if he were proud of how it cannot touch him, leaving the core of him unchanged.

What's the equivalent for pain of 'I am not my beliefs, I am that which updates them, I am not my plans, I am that which chooses them'?  Keltham is not... his pain, he's the thing that is unmoved by it?  Negative neural feedback does in fact sort of move people though??  Keltham is not his desire not to be in pain?  Keltham sort of thinks he is made out of, among other things, desires like that one?

"Carissa, temporary not quiet: do you know what the equivalent should be of 'I am not my beliefs, I am that which updates them, I am not my plans, I am that which chooses them' for pain?"  (This, the second layer of Impartiality, Keltham speaks in Baseline.)

That feels like such an important question and she's never thought about it at all - "I'm not sure, but maybe - I am not what I sense, I am that which - makes sense of it -"

All right then.  'I am not my sensory input, I am that which interprets it.'  He doesn't really see that helping?  But he'll try to take that mental posture anyways.  And take pride in being unmoved by the pain, a sense of delight that it cannot destroy him...

Keltham speaks the command word twice.

Carissa prays very very sincerely to Asmodeus to show Keltham whatever it is, if Asmodeus even knows it, that Keltham needs here. 

He takes slightly longer to get to the point of calling it off, this time. 

...and remembers this time to look at the burn left on his arm, the seared tissue that he let just go on getting damaged and damaged.  Remembers to feel the fear that he's maimed himself for life, that healing won't work for him this time, that physical injury is real and lasting and scary and destroys your life ever after, until you have to go step into the Future and leave your friends behind not to be seen again unchanged, because your life is so much less happy now and your friends wouldn't want you to stick it out just for them...

And heal.

"Yeah, that... basically didn't work even while I had enough concentration left to try to make it work.  The pain kept calling my attention back to it.  Trying to say that I was the mind interpreting pain, instead of identifying with the 'sensory-input', didn't help; telling myself that I was strong and delighting that I could pass through it didn't help.  What helped was either dissociating from it or my attention briefly going elsewhere before it got yanked back."

"But actual plus side, I remembered to experience the fear of injury, and watch healing work against that.  I think I'll have an easier time asking for martial-arts training from Security, now."

(Because Keltham is rather in doubt of his own ability to subdue and chain even Meritxell, with just a Bull's Strength and Cat's Grace, and dath ilani self-defense-only or group-safe-subdual skills.)