13 Jan 2013 Comments Off on Pleasure and Pain are One and the Same
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.
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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!
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