The Pain within Pleasure

November 23, 2009

--- On Mon, 23/11/09, www spiritual-teaching com <sadasivananda wrote:

THE PAIN WITHIN PLEASUREthe teaching of the Buddha fromwww.spiritual-teaching.com

The Buddha is sometimes misinterpreted as trying to squelch human affection in pursuit of some impersonal spiritual ideal. Nothing could be further from the truth. What he warns against is not affection as such, but self-centered attachment to what is personally pleasant. Attachment to pleasure is one of the most serious obstacles to spiritual growth. Aspirants can lose themselves in pleasure and abandon their quest for life's supreme purpose:

"Don't run after pleasure and neglect the practice of meditation. If you forget the goal of life and get caught in the pleasures of the world, You will come to envy those who put meditation first." (Dhammapada 209) Even if we continue to strive, we can get addicted to having pleasant things and people around us, so we cannot face life's inevitable unpleasantnesses without suffering:

"Not seeing what is pleasant brings pain, Seeing what is unpleasant brings pain. Therefore go beyond both pleasure and pain." (Dhammapada 210) The person who sees life as it is understands that the pleasant contains the unpleasant. Pleasant and unpleasant are not separate or separable; they are two sides of one experiential fact: that life is change. This apparent paradox is well explained in Keats's "Ode to Melancholy":

She dwells with beauty -- Beauty that must die; And joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh, Turning to Poison while the bee-mouth sips: Ay, in the very temple of delight Veiled melancholy has her sovran shrine... What blocks spiritual growth is not pleasurable things and

experiences themselves, but selfish attachment to them:

"Don't get selfishly attached to anything, For trying to hold on to it will bring you pain. When you have neither likes nor dislikes, you will be free."(Dhammapada 211) The 'hidden meaning' of things as they really are, lies beyond dualistic experience, waiting to be discovered by those who can travel upstream against conditioning:

"If you long to know what is hard to know and can resist The temptations of the world, You will cross the river of life. (Dhammapada 218)______________________________Text is paraphrased from Eknath Easwaran's commentary on "The Dhammapada".

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