Pleasure or Pain: Take Your Pick

As a Buddhist practitioner you learn that lust, greed and desire are negative qualities - hindrances on the path to enlightenment and in some texts, even evil. You learn that sensual pleasures are better left renounced and the body just a vehicle to be trained and overcome.

It was 12 years ago when I embarked on my Buddhist journey -- sitting for 10-day silent meditation retreats at Wat Suan Mokkh in Thailand, sleeping on cement slabs and reciting a Buddhist prayer before my scant meals to remind me that I was not eating the food in front of me for pleasure. It was on these retreats that I learned that lust, greed and desire were qualities to be abandoned. Being the experiential learner that I am, I decided to have a go at releasing these "evils" from my life. And with that, unknowingly, I also released some integral parts of myself.

I remember that upon returning from my Asian expedition friends commented on how peaceful I seemed. I felt peaceful. I felt relaxed. I felt like something inside me had shifted for the better. One close friend, however, said to me, "I miss your drive." I didn't know what to make of that statement at the time, but more recently I have found some meaning in those words.

There is a woman in New York City named Regena Thomasaeur who runs something called
"Mama Gena's School of Womanly Arts." Regena, otherwise known as 'Mama Gena,' is all about women naming and claiming their desires to live their fullest potential. She gives women permission to feel greedy, lustful and desirous. She believes that women are taught how to study hard, work hard and deprive themselves - but who is teaching them about pleasure? She is! To her, pleasure is the key to a woman recognizing her own power and her full-throttle life force.

Recently I read a statement by Swiss psychologist Carl Jung: "I would rather be whole than good." His premise was that the "dark side" of human nature needed to be integrated with the "lighter sides" into an overarching wholeness for full self-realization. Unfortunately I didn't have this to reflect on at the time I was pursuing my Buddhist studies.

The Buddhist teachings initiated me on the spiritual path years ago, but it hasn't been until recently that I have taken a closer look at the depth of how those teachings affected me. In Buddhism one is advised to release desirous attachments to eliminate pain and suffering in one's life, however could it be that denying aspects of your very human self causes its own kind of pain?

I cannot discount the wonderful things that Buddhist meditation has brought me - like sitting quietly, watching my thoughts, breathing deeply and finding the space and peace between the thoughts. I cannot deny the growth I have experienced in terms of developing gratitude and compassion at a much greater level than before my days with Buddhism. And I don't know of any other experience that has given me the depth and eternity of spaciousness that I experienced in my meditations in those days of silence. However I wonder today if I walked away from those retreats abandoning a key element of myself -- my desire.

"In order to take a rightful seat at the head of the banquet table of our lives, we have to accept the rightness of our feelings and desires and act on them strongly, always," says Mama Gena.

For someone who has followed (for the most part) a Buddhist philosophy for over a decade, and has trained herself to give up indulgence to live the Buddhist 'Middle Way,' this kind of suggestion could seem grossly out of the question. However for someone who is also committed to discovering one's power and potential as a woman, Mama Gena's philosophy seems like a worthy subject to investigate and definitely a fun one!

So I wonder -- as a woman, could the power of pleasure be the key that unlocks the way to our potential? And could a healthy dose of greed, lust and desire actually be beneficial to our personal fulfillment and path toward wholeness?

Maybe pleasure is one alternate path to enlightenment?

Comments

[Indra]

Unfortunately most Bhuddist teachers are attached to the concept of pain. The Bhudda himself was to me a fool. He walked away from pleasure to experience pain. Maybe for him it was a good thing as he sounded to me like a very spoiled rich kid. I think these type of people need this type of thing but for the rest of us we like to meditate on pleasure as there is so little of it sometimes. Now to be sure we need to disengage ourselves from what we consider ourselves at times to attain balance but to deny pleasure is a fools game. By the way I find that meditation always leaves me with more sexual energy.

[DiogenesOfAlaska]

While I doubt that there's enough first-hand knowledge to make a judgement, it is quite possible that the Buddha himself was a spoiled rich kid. At least that's what he says about himself.

But that doesn't make him a fool. I much prefer the Buddha to most spoiled rich kids, I can tell you that.

[LintLass]

It's kind of the *point* of the Buddha's story, there. He had all the illusions of comfort in the world and had to forsake it to discover the truth, upon witnessing the suffering of others.

He started out 'spoiled' in that he was born into *everything,* ....he was anything *but* spoiled in that ...it didn't spoil his heart or mind. Which is another matter. :)

[Arithrianos]

Tantra or Vajrayana is for those who desire to pursue a worldly and a meditative life at the same time. In Tantra the three poisons are directly transmuted to the three elixirs. Messing with the poisons for someone on the Hinayana path should be harmful as far as i know. Desire is not bad, it is the attatchment that is the problem, if you know how you can lick the honey off the razor blade, but if don't it hurts.

[DiogenesOfAlaska]

This is a bit similar to another criticism of buddhist philosophy that has sometimes been made: that the overcoming of opposites, the resolution of conflict and the stepping away from all dualisms could possibly come at the cost of denying the nature of evil. It can seem like buddhism 'denies' away evil.

I don't think this is so. Nor do I think that the purpose of meditation is to replace the power of pleasure. The flow of experience never stops, because the world keeps on changing. So the 'danger' that desire gets lost is itself mostly abstract. In a sense, there's always enough evil and experience to renew the need to get rid of it or cope with it.

But even if it is a perpetual struggle, it can still be less damaging than the rat race.

[LintLass]

Concepts of a 'nature of evil' ...particularly in a dualistic sense, don't tend to result in clarity or compassion ...rather, people decide the 'other' is evil, and that means they do 'evil' to 'fight' the evil 'other...' etc etc.

Even dualistic religion starts with the idea that 'Knowledge of good and evil' brought evil into the world. ...doubtless not an idea Diogenes would have recognized in that way, of course, but, to mix up words of wisdom, 'All it takes for evil is for good men to do nothing,' ....what might some Buddhists say to the question: What is fighting evil?

Nothing! :)

I mean, I'm not a Buddhist. I'm a Pagan. If something needs fighting, I don't need to label it as 'existenti­ally-evil' to fight it. I also know that actively doing constructive things, ....is real.

Frankly, it's we Westerners who feel Buddhism must be necessarily pursued in terms of 'excessive passivity,' ...cause duality and aggression are so bound up together in our broader culture. You don't have to believe 'evil' is in every conflict or opposes any 'good' action. People tend to inflate this to the point of helplessness or a need to 'demonize' anyone that doesn't agree.

Unnecessary.

[DiogenesOfAlaska]

It's certainly no small thing to speak of the 'nature of evil' either - and if it's not done right, then indeed it's probably itself evil.

Of course evil is not a substance or a thing or an object but a mode of behaviour. And I very much like the principle of 'All it takes for evil to persist...' that you quote as an implicit definition. Evil is what happens when unethical actions are observed and no intervention takes place, but silent agreement, assuming that an intervention would have been possible at no or little cost.

Again, I totally agree that the use of the term 'evil' can be very misleading and dangerous. But in this particular meaning, it exists.

Which also shows why the criticism that buddhism 'denies away' evil doesn't apply.

[samonet az]

I took a different lesson from Buddhist teachings. I learned that the core teaching is learning to embrace equanimity in all aspects of life. Most of us - myself included - tend to careen between the opposite poles of pleasure and pain. These things are a fact of life. However, 'suffering' is an attachment to EITHER pleasure or pain. Equanimity allows us to rise above the transitory nature of both. Attachment is really identification with the transitory nature of life experiences in all their forms. Therefore, in this equation, identification with pleasure is the same as having an aversion to it. The middle path acknowledges that pleasure and pain simply exist as phenomena neither to be overcome nor to be adopted as an identity. To recognize the divine in ourselves is to know that we are not the sum of our life experiences, but that we are the observers - experiencing life as we partake in its many ups and downs. The simple choice between pleasure and pain is what we all face. A middle path is not somewhere in the middle between the two; rather, it allows us to rise above the suffering that comes from feeling we have to choose between the two.