For what it's worth, I mean I haven't experienced this myself, but it's a commonplace among the Western Buddhist authors I read that practically anyone who gets far with certain kinds of meditative practice will eventually start "directly perceiving" that their brain was always attaching suffering to every experience, or something like that. I guess the idea is that, in uncultivated consciousness, there's never any point at which one is standing from the place where one could perceive the suffering as distinct from a possible background of not-suffering, so it never stands out.
It seems that the claim of "all phenomena are unsatisfactory" is meant to be first a technical claim about a purported truth about human consciousness that anyone could in principle verify with enough training, and only after that is it assumed to also validly imply a philosophical claim about the existential condition of all experiencing beings (so that existential nausea about this unsatisfactoriness could be considered a progress-milestone). So making an "I refute it thus", of people sometimes being happy, is sort of talking past the core claim without engaging with it. But at the same time, it seems like maybe there's a motte-and-bailey argument pattern going on, and it's important to challenge the connection between the motte ("nearly all humans have an unnoticed bad constant background level of suffering") and the bailey ("any state of experience more concrete than nirvana is intrinsically a sucker's game, net-suffering-wise").
Of course it's possible that the suffering, even if it is "directly perceived", is an observer effect -- an artifact of the meditative process used to allegedly train introspective perception up to that point, rather than something intrinsic to everyone including those who haven't practiced meditation.
I don't know what to make of this possibility. My current guess, from the reports I've read, is that there are some kinds of quite avoidable suffering that normally any human has, from their brain attaching suffering willy-nilly to not getting all sorts of things they want, as a sort of commitment device -- the same way one person might commit to retaliating against another for not giving them what they think they deserve, just using internal mechanisms of retaliation:
But there might be another kind of "suffering" associated with having erroneous anticipations, or with having attachments to possibilities (perhaps possibilities that one couldn't have known at the time were infeasible), as in the Predictive Processing cognitive-science paradigm for how brains push themselves to navigate spaces of possible combinations of future details when selecting actions. If that kind of "suffering" is part of what an advanced meditator discovers, I'm not sure how much this should be counted as suffering. Conceiving of that as "suffering" might be like conceiving of water as always finding higher altitudes "uncomfortable" and that that's why it flows downward whenever there's a downward to flow to. Extending that conception, to the idea that all concrete existence is a web of undertows that tries to ensnare all experiencing beings into a sea of suffering, might be like extrapolating to the idea that being at the earth's surface is torture for water and it's a moral emergency that all the water on the earth isn't at the earth's center.
While I was looking for the previous link I found another link that was about the question of whether the introspective experience of "dukkha", conceived as one unified treatable form of suffering, was just such an observer effect:
no subject
It seems that the claim of "all phenomena are unsatisfactory" is meant to be first a technical claim about a purported truth about human consciousness that anyone could in principle verify with enough training, and only after that is it assumed to also validly imply a philosophical claim about the existential condition of all experiencing beings (so that existential nausea about this unsatisfactoriness could be considered a progress-milestone). So making an "I refute it thus", of people sometimes being happy, is sort of talking past the core claim without engaging with it. But at the same time, it seems like maybe there's a motte-and-bailey argument pattern going on, and it's important to challenge the connection between the motte ("nearly all humans have an unnoticed bad constant background level of suffering") and the bailey ("any state of experience more concrete than nirvana is intrinsically a sucker's game, net-suffering-wise").
Of course it's possible that the suffering, even if it is "directly perceived", is an observer effect -- an artifact of the meditative process used to allegedly train introspective perception up to that point, rather than something intrinsic to everyone including those who haven't practiced meditation.
I don't know what to make of this possibility. My current guess, from the reports I've read, is that there are some kinds of quite avoidable suffering that normally any human has, from their brain attaching suffering willy-nilly to not getting all sorts of things they want, as a sort of commitment device -- the same way one person might commit to retaliating against another for not giving them what they think they deserve, just using internal mechanisms of retaliation:
https://neuroticgradientdescent.blogspot.com/2019/07/core-transformation.html
But there might be another kind of "suffering" associated with having erroneous anticipations, or with having attachments to possibilities (perhaps possibilities that one couldn't have known at the time were infeasible), as in the Predictive Processing cognitive-science paradigm for how brains push themselves to navigate spaces of possible combinations of future details when selecting actions. If that kind of "suffering" is part of what an advanced meditator discovers, I'm not sure how much this should be counted as suffering. Conceiving of that as "suffering" might be like conceiving of water as always finding higher altitudes "uncomfortable" and that that's why it flows downward whenever there's a downward to flow to. Extending that conception, to the idea that all concrete existence is a web of undertows that tries to ensnare all experiencing beings into a sea of suffering, might be like extrapolating to the idea that being at the earth's surface is torture for water and it's a moral emergency that all the water on the earth isn't at the earth's center.
While I was looking for the previous link I found another link that was about the question of whether the introspective experience of "dukkha", conceived as one unified treatable form of suffering, was just such an observer effect:
https://neuroticgradientdescent.blogspot.com/2019/12/dukkha-created-vs-discovered.html