As human beings, we all love pleasure. But have you ever questioned what pleasure really is? This post will change the way you think about pleasure.
The human mind is a pleasure seeking, pain avoiding mechanism. We talked about pain before. Now let’s understand pleasure. To really understand ourselves, our motivations, we need to understand pleasure. I’m going to take the example of pizza to explain the nature of pleasure. If you don’t like pizza, what is wrong with you? Just kidding, replace pizza with your favorite food.
Imagine you are really craving pizza – you just really want it. So you get online and order a delicious pizza, chock full of toppings and smothered with cheese. You are waiting for it to be delivered. It’s been 20 minutes already. Finally, after 40 minutes, the pizza is delivered. The smell of fresh pizza is wafting all over your home. You impatiently open the box and grab a slice. It’s hot. You blow on it to cool it down and finally have your first bite. And then another and then another. So delicious! You are totally satisfied. The pizza gave you so much pleasure. Right? Wrong!
It is not the pizza that gave you pleasure. It is your lack of craving for pizza that gave you pleasure. We miss this subtle distinction because the eating of the pizza, the end of the craving and the pleasure all happen nearly simultaneously.
In other words, the pleasure was always there. Your nature is pleasure, Ānanda. It was just obscured by the craving for pizza. That pizza was just a medium that allowed you to experience the pleasure, the bliss of your self nature.
You could either have a meditated experience of pleasure with objects like pizza or you could have an immediate experience of your pleasure without any objects. Don’t believe me that you can have pleasure without objects? I can prove it to you right now. Every night, you experience the pleasure of deep sleep. What object caused that pleasure, that bliss? I will leave you to contemplate the question.
