Pleasure/Pain: Opinion
Meditationtime Forum Post
Date: Posted 3 years before Jun 05, 2016
MiBeloved 3 years ago
Manish on LinkedIn:
Pleasure or pain!
Sometimes in our life we receive the pain and sometimes we receive the pleasure. We like pleasure and dislike the pain. What you say about both the conditions. Do you think that both the conditions are same or you also dislike the pain! Do you feel happiness in pleasure condition and sadness and frustration in Sad condition? As a spiritual person do you think that both the conditions are same?
MiBeloved's Response:
My view is that the conditions are similar but are not the same. Same as an English word really means exactly the same. But pleasure and pain are similar like the current in a battery. Some appliances like a bulb for instance will light up even if you reverse the polarity, but if you do that to the DC wires in certain computers, the instrument will not work.
Positive + voltage and negative – voltage are very similar but they are not the same. Electrons move in one direction. Their absence as they move causes something which is similar to but difference to their presence on the other side.
That pleasure and pain are experienced to be desirable and undesirable is an impulsion not a choice. Certain things override human preference and cause a compulsive reaction. For instance if you are shot in a vital organ, that will force you to change your attitude immediately even if you were doing the most pleasurable thing in the world.
As a spiritual person I am concerned with the facilities of the various environments in the various dimensions. Instead of seeking to change this environment, my quest is to locate one in which there is no painful sensations as a matter of course. What is natural here is natural here regardless of my presence or absence, and regardless of my tolerance or detachment from it. So I am not interested in staying on here to change myself to make this suitable.
Let this place remain as it is. I can relocate to some other place which has more suitable conditions. We are already doing this by moving from a lesser developed country to a more developed one, by getting a better job to get more income, by becoming more educated. So why not take them a step further and migrate to another type of manifestation?
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Years ago Sir Paul said, "The amount of pleasure a person experiences in life, the same amount of pain they will experience." The statement was perplexing to me. It depends on the attachment one has to a pleasure, I think. If a person feels positive, happy pleasure in watching a sunset, in turn what is to be expected in the experience opposite to this?
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It is very difficult to understand much less have the insight to see what Sir Paul said about the pleasure and its reverse or inversion but it is absolutely true. This is why in the Gita, Krishna told Arjuna about being balance in duality. It is a special trick used by advanced ascetics which prevents them from being gutted by the reverse of a pleasure or by the converse of a pain.
The problem with the whole thing is that when the pleasure or pain is overwhelming, when it is more than the individual can contain, the person cannot make a decision to be balanced, no more than a small yacht can keep itself afloat in a violent sea storm.
