Discriminating mind contains--you could say owns--its mental states, such as greed, jealousy, joy, pleasure--a whole army of negative as well as positive thoughts. As such, the mind and its states mutually reinforce each other. The mental states are not the mind; they are just the soldiers doing the bidding of the mind, helping to maintain and perpetuate it. While volition is also a mental aggregate along with sensation and perception, it works at much more subtle level. Being the aggregate that leads to action, volition ensures that all living beings are constantly in a state of motion and arising. For this reason they cannot escape from the subtler form of pervasive suffering.

Suffering pervades the three realms of existence that make up samsara6: the realm of desire, the realm of form, and the formless realm. This is so because these realms are characterized by attachment, however coarse or subtle. Take someone of great attainment whose highly refined consciousness is free from the coarser attachments of greed, hatred, jealousy, and other lower discriminations. That person has reached the samadhi of 'neither conceptualization nor non-conceptualization'--the samadhi of infinite consciousness. In this very high state one is free from the suffering of suffering and from the suffering of impermanence, but one is still subject to pervasive suffering.

The three realms are dimensions of existence where beings reside depending on their level of their consciousness. Until one transcends these three realms, they are not free from suffering. In the realm of desire, where humans exist, we have all three levels of suffering. Even if one abides in a deep samadhi where they are free from the suffering of impermanence, that individual returns to the world of vexation when they come out of samadhi. For this reason no matter how refined the level of consciousness, as long as there is attachment, that individual will experience pervasive suffering.