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Pleasure and Pain

The mind is constantly in search for pleasure over pain, as if there is a preference. When there is pleasure through an experience, it will want more of it, become addicted to it and yearn for it. It will be soon when the planning, scheming and manipulation starts coming into play to prey for what it wants; and when it doesn’t get what it wants, it gets weary, disappointed and down. The blaming happens without delay of a single instant. It is either someone out there who is wronged, or back to itself that it crucifies. But what difference is another or its own, as if it diminishes any pain.

What is opposite of pleasure, but pain itself? And this is factual of such duality. The pain may not come directly from another but through a situation or thing, but storylines are not important as the result of it is still pain.

It is not from pleasure that pain is experienced. It is the greed for pleasure that consequences pain. The addiction to pleasure is the attachment to the experience of pleasure, and that addiction results in greed. The greed creates the wanting to have more thus the scheming and manipulation comes into place. Scheming and manipulation comes from the space of defilement, and hence its outcome cannot be of joy. Even if the plan is successful once in a while, it can be almost guaranteed that it is for short term and will not last for very long. And since addiction and greed is constantly hovering, the suffering intensifies and thus prolonged.

We shun pain away because it hurts. We avoid it at all costs because we have been taught that it is not pretty. But what could be the difference between pleasure and pain but our judgment on them when they are indeed one and have never been separated.

Yet if we don’t judge pain and welcome it as they come, together with it comes multiple possible experiences. And when we dwell in pain because of these experiences, what difference does it make from our previous attachment to pleasure? Still, is it possible that one drowns in pain when the world comes to rescue when she feels like but a victim? For this she would choose her pain, and does it not equates to the nature of greed?

Call pleasure pain, and it will hurt. Call pain a pleasure, and the pain behind the pleasure will be felt no more. Sin’s witnesses but shift from name to name, as one steps forward and another back. Yet which is foremost makes no difference. Sin’s witnesses hear but the call of death. – A Course in Miracles.

Detachment is the key, and another word for it is letting go. But since detachment or letting go cannot be practiced, then let understanding be the key to peace. It can be through inquiry, it can be through reading – anything that the heart calls to – that is the path it leads. Yet what is required is much willingness and honesty, thus soon understanding and realization will then knock its door. An open mind is the doorway, and the will for truth is the drive; what would you have your peace traded for, when all you are asked of is only your honesty and surrender?   

When they visit, let them come. Embrace them without appraisal or condemnation; then let them go when they go. There is nothing to it, it is not personal.

Equanimity is the ultimate state, where there is no preference of pleasure nor pain; for it finally recognizes that all is only nature, all impermanent as they come and go; that there is nothing at all to hang on to, now if that is not peace, then what is?

One Response to “Pleasure and Pain”

  1. Hor Tuck Loon says:

    Whichever way is lost, until understanding comes running my way. Until then, any spiritual support does not work, not even when HS whispers so clearly in my ears or shows me obvious signs I have erred, level with when my dearest beloved moves away from me for my highest good to wake me up from this slumber.

    It is near to impossible to get out of the pain, so long as I hold on to my righteousness. Only at the moment of surrendering, of willingness to submit to inquiry of what went weary, can understanding start to emerge. And sadly, surrendering only comes when we admit defeat, after everything else fails to what we hold on.

    Never once, not even in the future, nor the past is the world wrong – this principle sets the foundation towards reconciliation of Spirit. Until then, the nightmare has to continue…

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