Love and Happiness: Fleeting Pleasure, Enduring Pain

By S H Venkatramani

Let's talk about pleasure and pain. Pleasure first, because it makes you feel good. But life's pleasures seem so fleeting and evanescent, like glistening dewdrops that evaporate with the first hint of the warm rays of the sun.

A pleasant state of being , we instinctively feel, is intrinsically unstable. Pleasure vanishes like a transient bubble, while pain endures. What is pleasant is short-lived because the human mind quickly gets used to it, and subconsciously craves to heighten and intensify that feeling of pleasure, as it lingers in the memory and haunts the mind.

Man's mind remembers and reconstructs a pleasurable experience and yearns to perpetuate and intensify that pleasant memory by seeking to recreate and magnify the sensation.

It is the yearning for more and more of that sensation, that feeling and that memory which causes man's greed and avarice. It is scientifically impossible to satisfy our craving for more physical and mental possessions.

This desire for an infinitely intensifying and ever-growing pleasurable sensation is therefore self-defeating.

Lord Krishna expounds this truth in the Bhagavad Gita: "When the mind, completely transcended, rests in the Self alone, free from longing for all objects of desire, then he is said to be a Yukta , manifest in self-knowledge".

He continued, "The unsteady and the fickle, being attached to fruits through desire, are ever bound". Pleasure begins to recede as you approach it, goaded by desire. The quest for pleasure is, therefore, futile. It vanishes while pain endures.

Pain and suffering often overwhelm us, leaving us feeling utterly helpless. We feel completely at the mercy of an inexplicable and omnipotent divine force. "As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods:/ They kill us for their sport" - This is how William Shakespeare poignantly articulated man's pathetic plight as he grapples with the uncertainties of life.

He feels like a rudderless raft, adrift in the mighty and mysterious sea of life. Pain endures. It is caused by stress. It is born of tension between what is, and what you desire.

All suffering arises from the fundamental conflict between what is and what should be. When different forces pull the mind in different directions, the resulting tension between the Self and perceived reality causes disappointment and sorrow.

It is the dualism between the Self and the universe that manifests as suffering. At the root of pain and suffering is the illusory sense of abiding identity of a human being, the mirage of a distinctive Self. It is this everlasting maya of the Self that blesses pain and sorrow with eternal life.

It is a daunting challenge to transcend the vice-like grip of this selfhood. You have to lift yourself above the maya of the individual Self, the jivatma, unselfconsciously and not by a determined effort of the will.

As Fenelon explains: "Real simplicity lies in a just milieu that is equally free from thoughtlessness and affectation, in which the soul is not overwhelmed by externals, so as to be unable to reflect, nor yet given up to the endless refinements, which self-consciousness induces. That soul which looks where it is going without losing time arguing over every step, or looking back perpetually, possesses true simplicity".

Fenelon defines simplicity as "an uprightness of soul which prevents self-consciousness". To be really simple, you have to transcend the enduring mirage of the self without the subtlest self-adulation. This logic of the soul is as irrefutably true as it is metaphysically subtle.

As St John of the Cross explains: "The soul that is attached to anything, however much good there may be in it, will not arrive at the liberty of divine union". For the good of God "can only be contained in an empty and solitary heart".

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See also: Love and Happiness, Life and Beyond, Death and Dying, Body Mind and Soul

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