Author:Amy Torres

Pleasure and Pain are One and the Same

The article below, “Pleasure and Pain are One and the Same,” offers clarification on a subject many ACIM students find difficult to understand.  Thank you, Helgi, for such a clear explanation–very in keeping with A Course in Miracles.

* * * * *

In the world of form there is pleasure and there is pain. Everything in the world is subject to polarities, and so we could say that all things already contain their opposite; you cannot have good without bad, and every high has a corresponding low. In the very nature of gaining something lies the possibility of losing it, and we know this intuitively. And so if we look closer, we see that pleasure and pain are really one and the same: they are the two polarities of suffering.

The great misunderstanding

And how can pleasure be suffering, you ask? We may think that pleasure is an aspect of joy and peace, and this is certainly what our culture wants us to believe, but trying to derive pleasure from the world of form, and thus looking for peace and joy outside yourself, will always lead to suffering. And another aspect of the misunderstanding is that, counter to what we might assume from surface appearances, externally derived pleasure is really no closer to joy than pain. We associate the two because they often go together on the surface, but pleasure does not in any way contribute to the sense of joy, no more than pain does. And in fact, pain can bring us closer to joy than pleasure because it prompts us to break free from the polarity, whereas pleasure seduces us further and further into the illusion.

There is a verse in the Bhagavad Gita that addresses this:

“Pleasures from external objects
are wombs of suffering, Arjuna.
They have their beginnings and their ends;
no wise man seeks joy among them.”

The reason that pleasures from external objects are wombs of suffering, as Krishna is saying, is because we mistake externally derived pleasure for peace and joy. The suffering lies in the belief that you need to gain something, that you need to add something to yourself to be complete. This belief is included in the illusion that joy can be derived from the world of form, because what you are really seeking in all of this is yourself, and a sense of being at home, of having arrived. And this misunderstanding, that your identity and the sense of home is somewhere out there in the world of form, is actually the essence of suffering and the core of all human misery.

The truth is that the joy you are seeking is already whole, and already within you. It is God, the one, yourself, peace, joy, truth, love — whatever you want to call it, it is already complete and cannot possibly be added to in any way by something in the world of form. It cannot be outside of you because it is the essence of who you are. And the illusion that you need to acquire it from somewhere in the world of form is the suffering that then manifests as the polarity of pleasure and pain.

Renunciation is not required

However, and as if I haven’t complicated it enough already, pleasure and pain only turn into suffering when you are seeking yourself in them. Which is why it is not necessary at all to renounce all sensory pleasures in order to become free from suffering. Some people do this, and in some cases it works, but abstaining completely from worldly pleasures is certainly no requirement.

It is possible to enjoy worldly pleasures without suffering when you recognize that any sense of joy you may experience in conjunction with it arises from within and is in no way derived from out there. And when you realize this, you will feel that pleasure and pain don’t carry much weight with you anymore. You will begin to experience both with the same sense of detachment, and then it really doesn’t matter that much which end of the polarity you are faced with. Pleasure will most likely still be your preference of the two, but it is relatively unimportant none the less.

You are then free to enjoy the things of this world, without demanding that anything should give you joy or make you happy. And in fact when you don’t have the expectation that things should give you joy, you can engage with the world in a much lighter and more playful way than before, in a way that is free of tension and stress.

Freedom from pleasure

Our conditioning has a momentum, as I’m sure you must be very aware of, and the pull of form is strong. When things are going well and the world seems promising, it is very easy to fall back into the illusion that there is lasting fulfillment to be found in form. And as long as you believe, even just a little bit, that something out there can give you what you think you need, you will continue to seek for pleasure in the world of form, and continue to bounce between the two polarities of suffering, pleasure and pain.

The way to become free of this illusion is simply to see it for what it is, and to realize that pleasure is not really what you want. This realization can be reached in a number of ways, and one of the more direct ones is to directly question the values that we have been conditioned to project onto the things of this world; seeing one thing as desirable and another as undesirable. In relative terms this will of course be the case, but in the conditioning these are absolute judgments implying that joy is to be found in some things and suffering in others.

Here are a couple more verses from the Gita that talk about this:

“They do not rejoice in good fortune;
they do not lament at bad fortune;
lucid, with minds unshaken,
they remain within what is real.”

“The mature man, fulfilled in wisdom,
resolute, looks with equal
detachment at a lump of dirt,
a rock, or a piece of pure gold.”

Questioning the assumption that the high is good and the low is bad leads one to see that there is nothing to be gained by good fortune, and nothing to be lost in bad fortune. Having realized this, you become like the men of wisdom that Krishna talks about and simply “remain within what is real.” And what is real is beyond good and bad, beyond high and low.

Looking “with equal detachment at a lump of dirt, a rock, or a piece of pure gold,” is the result of this realization, and can also be a pointer to it. You can practice this, as an experiment or a meditation, and question the differences in value that you project onto the world as the thoughts arise. This will expose the mechanics of the conditioning, and the illusion will start to slowly unravel. We could say that it is a practice of withdrawing projected value from the world of form — not in a negative way, but in a way that values all things equally and fully. There will still be relative preferences, but what the practice does is make way for an intuitive seeing of how all things are inherently neither good nor bad. As Shakespeare wrote, “for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

When you see beyond the conditioned polarity of good and bad, pleasure and pain, you find what you were looking for all along, what was always there, what always is and always has been; a sense of peace and joy that is not of this world, and of which form derived pleasure is merely a pale reflection.

This article is reprinted from http://everydaywonderland.com.   It seems to have been written by Helgi … thank you, Helgi!

The Ego and Worldly Interests

The article below, “The Ego and Worldly Interests,” is an excellent commentary on detachment and non-attachment.  Thank you, Helgi, for a beautifully written piece–very in keeping with A Course in Miracles.

* * * * *

Part of life in the world, and especially the western world, is that we have lots of interesting things around us. And part of what makes up one’s personality, the form identity, are particular worldly interests and personal preferences. John is into vintage medical illustrations and Lisa rides motorcycles. That sort of thing.

Now, because they make up such a large part of our form identity, of who we are on the surface and in comparison to others, our worldly interests are part of the ego and as such vulnerable to its foibles. We tend to identify with objects, for example, and so when the objects are linked with something like expertise, community, or a lifestyle, the identification can become very strong.

In seeking mode

There is a good chance you will have experienced how the ego goes hunting for something to identify with, even if you may not have been conscious of it at the time. Usually when there’s a lull of some kind in your external circumstances, when you’ve just recently finished something, lost something, quit something, or when you suddenly find yourself with more free time for some reason, the mind goes into seeking mode for the next thing. The ego has just lost something it had identified with, and so needs to find something new to fill in the gap.

These seeking episodes can be almost too subtle to notice, or all-out desperate attempts at reinventing your identity from scratch. The subtle ones can come in the form of suddenly becoming very interested in a particular television series, for example, where you find yourself identifying strongly with the characters, having daydreams in which you act out roles or somehow project yourself into the show, and even adapt behavioral traits from your favorite characters.
Fantasies where you imagine yourself to have a stronger identity, either through association with some object or person, or through approval and fame — basically where you are “special” in one way or the other — are also an indicator of this seeking pattern.

The lure of “reinventing yourself”

But while identifying with celebrities or fictional television characters is an easy way of finding something to identify with, in times of desperate need the ego will want something more concrete to work with. Personally I have experienced this in the form of becoming absolutely obsessed with different hobbies or specialty interests; mainly communities of enthusiasts that center around some sort of object or industry. It is an urge to become part of a scene, to become that kind of person, all in order to find security in an externally supported identity.

To find one of these “worlds” to enter and become part of is an easy way for the ego to reinvent its identity. Like dressing up in a new costume, it is also a way of finding somewhere to belong; something we do in more subtle ways when choosing how we present ourselves to the world externally through clothing and such. Seeking to become this kind of person or that kind of person, experimenting with different externally derived identities, is of course very noticeable during adolescence, as we know, but the same pattern of seeking goes on long after that.

This idea of reinventing yourself is a favorite one to the ego. Starting the year with a clean slate, turning things around, becoming the person you want to be, etc.; it’s seducing, and entertaining these ideas is almost the equivalent of comfort food for the ego-identified mind.
But even if you become someone else on the surface, take up golfing or buy a Harley, all that’s really changed is the content of your illusory identity. The same clunky old projector playing a new film.

Attachment to being a somebody

However, there is nothing inherently wrong with having preferences or particular worldly interests. You can live in joy and inner peace and still have hobbies and belong to the national association of something or other. Even the game of reinventing yourself on the surface can be fine — as with other aspects of the world of form, the crux of the matter lies in your level of attachment to it.

It is unavoidable that as long as you are in this world, you will have an external identity. Even if it weren’t for social conventions like names, roles and other labels, you would still be in a particular human body. This is not problematic in and of itself, and only becomes a problem when you identify yourself with this external identity. When you say “I am this body” or “I am a basketball player.” In effect, the world of form is not a problem until you become attached to it. Having a Harley Davidson is fine, but basing your entire identity on the concept of being somebody who has a Harley Davidson is problematic.

There is certainly a correlation between strongly emphasized form identities and the level of attachment to them, simply because if you are free of attachment to the world of form you will have little interest in projecting a particular image of yourself, and vice versa. But the outward manifestation of something like a personal preference is still just an effect, a symptom, and not the cause, and so there is no reason to avoid or resent your form identity. In fact, making an effort to deny your form identity is really an indication that you have an attachment to another kind of form identity, perhaps as “the spiritual person who has no worldly interests.”

When it comes to hobbies, preferences, or other things having to do with your form identity, it will only be counterproductive to try and deny or resist them. What you can do however is observe, and allow them to be as they are. Fully embrace whatever the worldly interest is, and investigate in what way you may be deriving an identity from it. If you’re identified with something, there is an attachment to it because the ego needs it for its survival. In mild cases it may be enough to just notice the identification, and then allow it to fade away on its own, but in some cases it may be best to simply drop whatever it is you are attached to, at least temporarily.

There are also some pointers you can experiment with, ways of looking at things that separate the element of identification so that you can see it more clearly. For example, you can approach the thing, whatever it might be, as if you weren’t there, removing yourself from the mental picture. Or, if the interest is heavily based on community, a group of like-minded people that share a particular interest, you can try contemplating questions like “if I were the only one interested in this,” or “if nobody could ever know that I own this/did this/am interested in this, what would change?” If you have expertise in something, ask yourself “what if nobody could ever know that I know this?”

In essence, it is about seeing the things in your form identity that make you feel special, feel like you are a somebody, because these will be your points of attachment. The attachment to being a somebody is probably the main aspect of our identification with form, and observing how this plays into our worldly interests and preferences can be enormously helpful in becoming free of attachment to the world.

This article is reprinted from http://everydaywonderland.com.   It seems to have been written by Helgi … I hope I have that right.