Pleasure vs. Enjoinment
May 15, 2008 by Pablo
We have been exploring different aspects of happiness, pleasure, suffering, etc., and I’d like to offer another perspective.
According to many spiritual traditions pleasure and pain go together. I seem to see that working in my life. It was said that “pain is the price for pleasure, pleasure is the reward for pain”. Does it mean we are bound to have a dull existence if we want to escape that pair of opposites? I don’t think so. There is a third factor that could be an alternative path: enjoyment. Let us examine it with an example.
We can enjoy a good dinner. We may experience the moment joyfully and derive from it what we could call pleasure, but that for the sake of the argument I will call “enjoyment”. A natural tendency in human beings, however, is to try to repeat ad infinitum the stimulus that produced a sense of joy. Therefore, the eating becomes a search for pleasure, and we end over-eating. Logically, all that “unlawful” pleasure we enjoyed has a price, whether it is an eventual illness or the deprivation of food that we have to undergo in a diet. The same thing happens when we turn the enjoyment derived from relationships, situations and objects into sources of pleasure.
Enjoyment is always balanced, healthy. It is based on the present moment. Since it is free from the craving for pleasure, it doesn’t overdo anything. But when the desire for repetition (whether during the particular situation or after it was done) appears in scene, the enjoyment is replaced by pleasure and it ends in suffering. We don’t live the moment anymore. We think about the object of pleasure, we look forward to be in contact with it again, and create the appropriate situations to get it.
Now, every single thought we spend on that, every single thought that created that tendency in us (called “skandha” in Buddhism) will have to be paid with suffering, because that skandha we created is not part of our original nature and eventually it has to be dissolved, either in this or in any other life. That dissolution involves a kind of starving, just like in a diet, or when trying to get rid of any addiction. And how much starving we have to go through depends on how much we have overfeed that particular skandha.
The key then, seems to be in learning how to enjoy without any movement to prolong the enjoyment.
What do you think? Have you experienced those two kinds of feelings? How do you work on that?
Chris
Govert
Pablo
katinkaspiritual
latebrake
mitdyob
Eating has always been a sore issue for me. Starting at about age 21, I was restricted to a meal a day on average for several years, due to internal damages within the digestive tract. Fifty percent of my meals in the last two decades have caused visible blood to pour forth from my body, thereby incurring a loss of half of the hemoglobin (although the hemoglobin has since regenerated).
I was about 100 pounds lighter than I am now, because my body had gone into starvation mode, because it was more painful for me to eat than to starve. The sensation of eating was a bodily torture to me, and the smallest meals would sometimes send me to the hospital emergency room week after week as the digestive tract would swell shut.
Eventually heavy steroid (prednisone) therapy was administered to prevent further bloody discorporation of the digestive tract, destroying a formerly finely muscled physique by packing on 50 pounds of excess artificial bodyweight. Prednisone is different from anabolic steroids, in that it doesn’t boost muscle strength. My body currently carries about 50 pounds of excess water weight which perpetually doubles the blood pressure. I had to consciously sacrifice my former shape resembling that of a muscled teen, in order to bio-chemically bolster the structural density of the organs.
Unlike most people, my body has required steroids (prednisone) to eat a simple meal for the better part of two decades. Currently to prevent bloody organ discorporation, I must satiate myself with food to the point where it has no taste, in contrast to my former years of starvation. My current goal is to be steroid-free in six months, which will ideally lead to a fifty pound loss of water weight shortly thereafter.
Vin0000 - I’m sorry to hear that.
Pablo - the issue you are trying to bring up, I think, is attachment to enjoyment. There is obviously nothing wrong with enjoyment itself - but there is perhaps something wrong with trying to grasp it, hold on to it, repeat it.
In the same way trying to avoid pain and sorrow is not going to work. I obviously don’t mean that people in sad situations shouldn’t try to get out of them if they can - just that the psychological mechanism of ignoring or suppressing the pain is not going to work.