Vivekananda Mailing List-11/11/03

[Guest guest]

An uncultured man loves the pleasures of the senses intensely; as he

becomes cultured, he begins to love intellectual pleasures, and his

sense-enjoyments become less and less. No man can enjoy a meal with the

same gusto or pleasure as a dog or a wolf, but those pleasures which a

man gets from intellectual experiences and achievements, the dog can

never enjoy. At first, pleasure is in association with the lowest

senses; but as soon as an animal reaches a higher plane of existence,

the lower kind of pleasures becomes less intense. In human society, the

nearer the man is to the animal, the stronger is his pleasure in the

senses; and the higher and the more cultured the man is, the greater is

his pleasure in intellectual and such other finer pursuits. So when a

man gets even higher than the plane of the intellect, higher than that

of mere thought, when he gets to the plane of spirituality and of

divine inspiration, he finds there a state of bliss, compared with

which all the pleasures of the senses, or even of the intellect, are as

nothing.