In the EC/HE theory no stable manifest state can arise without irreversible differentiation. For something to appear as a lasting experience, identity or structure, relations must be stabilised and separated from other possibilities. Every stabilisation thereby entails a cost: something is bound, delimited and maintained as determinate experience through the Experience Circle.

The cost arises because stability always entails that one understanding is given precedence over other possible understandings. When a relation is stabilised, the freedom for reorganisation is simultaneously reduced. What is achieved as order is paid for with increased binding, inertia and resistance to change.

This principle is found at all levels of reality. Stars must continuously release energy to maintain stability. Biological organisms must combust and reorganise themselves in order to live. Memories leave lasting traces. The ego binds experience to particular identities and representations. Even atoms and particles maintain stable relations through bonding and structure.

Stability is never free. The more stable and lasting a structure is, the stronger the binding, inertia and resistance to reorganisation that arises. What appears as order, identity and duration simultaneously appears as limitation of other possible states.

Landauer’s principle expresses one physical consequence of this relationship. In the EC/HE theory it points towards a more general principle that applies across physics, biology, psychology and society: all manifest stability demands an irreversible cost.

This does not mean that the cost is a defect in the system. It is the price that must be paid for experience, identity, memory, structure and manifest existence to be able to arise at all.

Suffering and loss are human expressions of the cost that makes experience possible. Where something is stabilised, something else must be relinquished. Where something is gained, other possibilities are closed. Thus suffering, loss and change do not follow from a defect in reality, but from the same mechanism that makes experience, identity, memory and manifest existence possible.

This is also the reason why the EC/HE theory resolves the philosophical problem of suffering. Suffering is not a defect in the system, not a sign that something is wrong with reality or with the one who suffers. Suffering is the cost of differentiation. Differentiation is the cost of experience. Experience is the cost of KNOWING. What is experienced as pain, loss and separation is the unavoidable price for experience, identity and love to be able to exist at all. Without suffering — no love.

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