"...negative feelings in biosystems are not a mere mirror image of positive feelings, because there is a much higher sense of urgency for change involved in states of suffering, and because it occurs in combination with the phenomenal qualities of losing control and coherence of the phenomenal self—and that this is what makes conscious suffering a very distinct class of states, not just the negative version of happiness." - T. Metzinger. This "fundamental asymmetry between suffering and joy" seems true enough, but it is also the case that there is a truth value that is not precisely in suffering but contiguous with it and perhaps only accessible by way of it, which outweighs the values associated with joy and other positive or ego syntonic states. You must tread carefully in this, but it seems that the systematic organisation on behalf of the phenomenal self, which is much of what we call experience (understood as being inextricable from our generative theories of experience) functions as a veil which conceals the noumenal self, the real subject. But suffering generally doesn't take us anywhere, since whatever portion of our analytic intellect remains accessible is given over to finding ways out of that state, although often its efforts seem to have the reverse effect. The intellect bears an ambivalent, even an oedipal relation to suffering which it fails to understand. The possibility is there however, amid the storm, to train it upon the lie which we have hitherto spent our lives shoring up.