Sitting in a meditation hall filled with a few hundred
people in southern India I wondered what the heck he was saying. Pleasure
seemed like a good thing to me at the time. Pleasure, happiness, joy, bliss, it
was all the same, wasn’t it? And then I went a little deeper…
The cost of pleasure is always paid with pain (suffering),
because pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin. The face on both sides of this coin is
the ego. The ego arrives in humans around the age of 2-4 years old. You may
notice if you watch a child it is at this time that their eyes will change,
just a bit. Suddenly there is a “me” or “mine.” At first it may seem cute, and
then not so much.
You could look at the ego as a jar for the many parts, or
personalities of a human being. Each experience allows for a new and unique
part (anger, fear, happiness, contentment, excitement, etc.) to be added to the
container. Different circumstances or triggers will call up any given part, in
any given order, at any given time. Sometimes multiple parts will arise at the
same time, and sometimes parts or personalities may not even know about each
other. I’m not talking about multiple personality disorder; just ordinary mentally
stable people have parts within themselves, which do not know about each other.
Have you ever heard someone say something in one moment and then a day later
contradict themselves? This is an example of parts within their container
popping up and out at different times. Both things they stated are completely
true to them, in the moment they were said, because of the part that was
talking. Of course this is an extremely simplified version of a complex system
but the goal is to give your mind a picture of the ego and how it keeps
personalities alive.
So how does this have anything to do with pleasure and pain?
Well, the ego’s job is to survive and to do that it will create an idea and aim
to have its person fixate on that idea. It could be a question that needs an answer;
it could be an object of affection that once obtained would be “the thing” that
would make all suffering disappear. But here is where it is interesting. The
ego will carefully craft the desired idea so that once it is obtained it will
automatically lead a person back to pain, because a new object of affection (or
a new question) will be introduced to a different personality within a person;
which will begin the cycle once again. It is quite a cleaver program!
There are multiple ways to see the program and begin to
dissolve it. Because of its complexity there are many levels; however I will
focus on just one simple technique for you today.
Start by noticing what things trigger different
personalities within yourself. Is there something that causes pleasure in your
life but always goes sideways, and you find yourself starting from the
beginning? What is that thing? An example could be a getting a certain car,
job, house, or relationship. If the thing is taken away, are you in pain? If
so, you know that was a game of the ego because what you were actually
experiencing was pleasure, which is conditional.
When the ego has dissolved true happiness will come from the
heart; there will be a sense of knowing when happiness is present. There will
be a connectedness with true happiness that cannot be tinkered with by the ego,
the mind, or negative thoughts. Happiness just is, and then there can be sadness, or other
emotions that flow freely. The expansion of life is about feeling all feelings
no matter what arises. There could be happiness, sadness, anger, rage, fear,
and once fully connected there will not be a preference for one or the other
because you are experiencing life and nothing can shake you, because you
realize at a deeper level, that this is why you came here.
