June 21, 2024
Principle 6. Pleasure. Fourth Week
“If you pursue pleasure, you enchain yourself to suffering. But as long as you do not harm your health, enjoy without inhibition when the opportunity presents itself.”
Last time: Neither the Carrot nor the Stick.
This time: A Look Ahead
Photo by Rafael Edwards
This Week:
Over the last three weeks we considered this principle in general: what it means, how it fits in with the others, etc. We also looked at how we did or didn’t use this principle in past situations, and how it applies to the present. This week we’ll try to understand how we might apply the principle in the future.
To help gain some new perspectives we will also play the game of Explain It!
At our next meeting we will discuss our observations, thoughts, reflections, and questions regarding all this.
The Game of the Week.
Explain It!
The rules for this week’s game are simple and summed up in its name.
Here are two possible approaches (there could be many others). Like with the game of Ask About It! in order to play we need to engage another player, or players. If I can manage to talk to someone that’s great but if I can’t, whether because of my personal circumstance, shyness, etc. I can write down my thoughts in a brief email — whether I send it or not is another matter. The point is to take a first step by putting my thoughts, and intuitions into a form that is suitable for sharing.
Of course, just as with other games, I might find myself with no one to play with. For example, no one of whom I can either ask their opinion, or tell them mine.
Such a situation might well be an opportunity to reflect on what that absence implies, and perhaps even take measures in enrich my social environment.
Another thing this game has in common with the game of Ask About It! is that it’s a game! In this game our interest is on engaging and communicating. Convincing, preening, recruiting, etc. are outside of the goals of the game. Rather, you are simply sharing your interpretation of something you find interesting.
General Considerations and Personal Reflections
Here’s somethings I was thinking about:
These are personal reflections. I offer them in the spirit of dialogue and exchange, and look forward to hearing your thoughts about, and experiences with, this principle.
Thinking about how this principle might apply to the present seemed less clear to me than how it would have been useful for me in the past. Given that, how can I begin to think about its relevance to my future situations? Or is it simply that I see the past more clearly because it is gone? Is it that the pleasures and pursuit that attract me now invisible precisely because they are not the ones I see clearly as they fade into the past? Is it because I’m so wrapped up in them that I can’t even imagine anything else?
After a night’s sleep I wake up. That seems pretty trivial, but Silo, explained that in reality we live most of our waking life in a kind of sleep, lost in reverie, or daydreams. That can be hard to see, so hard that some people immediately reject such an idea absurd, patently false, or — which might be worse, a metaphor that refers to the state of pretty much everyone else. But, once you’ve discovered for yourself the strength and permanence of the reveries, it becomes apparent that what I call being awake is another kind of sleep. As the Inner Look puts it: “Only rarely do I perceive reality in a new way, and it is then that I realize that what I normally see resembles sleep or semi-sleep”.
If I make a careful effort to learn to be aware of those mental distractions, I might eventually be able to discern a common background to those daydreams, internal dialogues, and half-noticed musings, that make up such an important and permanent feature of my internal life. That background climate running through, or behind them, has been called the reverie nucleus.
Because, of its permanence and ubiquity that nucleus is difficult to discern when it is acting. But it changes over time, and like the sun that is difficult to look at in its full brilliance, is perhaps easier to see as it’s dawning or fading away. It should be no surprise that the things that I desire, and those I fear are different today than they were in the past. Not, because I am free of those daydreams that reveal and disguise my hopes, fears, and desires, but because such things normally vary over time and according to the stage of life. And when they are strongest, they can be hardest to see. So, I can start to see things that trapped me as their strength starts to fade, but the dreams and desires that hold me entranced today are no doubt more difficult to see.
Am I mistaking a different background climate, a different internal landscape, different desires and ways of searching for the absence of these things? Am I free of the search for pleasure? If not pleasure (and its pursuit) what is it that motivates me every day? Why do I choose this thing and not another. Can I enjoy pleasures but not pursue them? I who am frustrated at every little inconvenience, impatient with others, and with circumstance? I don’t even seem capable of noticing my attachments to things, until I try to give them away, or they are taken from me.
These meditations have put me in mind of Silo’s first public talk, The Healing of Suffering. It is short, its context and form are both unusual and intriguing. Silo explained years later that his entire teaching can be seen as commentary on this talk, and the book, The Inner Look.
I’m kind of surprised that I hadn’t turned to it sooner in trying to sort out this question of pleasure, and pursuit of desire, since these are among its central themes.
…See how desire can trap you. But notice that there are desires of different qualities. There are cruder desires, and there are more elevated desires. Elevate desire, purify desire, surpass desire! In doing so, surely you will have to sacrifice the wheel of Pleasure—but you will also become free of the wheel of Suffering.
Silo_ The Healing of Suffering
I will spend some time this week re-reading and thinking about that old talk. If you’d like to do the same, you can find the text, as well as audio recordings here:
http://www.silo.net/en/present_milestone/index
Remember
- the principle in relation to what my future might hold
-Play the game of Explain It!
Worth Repeating:
…Consider, for example, the word, “future.” One person is set on edge, another remains indifferent, and a third would sacrifice their “today” to reach it.
Silo_ Internal Landscape III
Coming Up:
This document is meant as a support for our practice of focusing on one of the 12 Principles of Valid Action each month. Next week we will turn to principle 7, the principle of Immediate Action.
Note:
These notes have been posted on Facebook and sent to our email list, and, on my website www.dzuckerbrot.com
Don’t forget:
In some moment of the day or night inhale a breath of air, and imagine that you carry this air to your heart. Then, ask with strength for yourself and for your loved ones. Ask with strength to move away from all that brings you contradiction; ask for your life to have unity. Don't take a lot of time with this brief prayer, this brief asking, because it is enough that you interrupt for one brief moment what is happening in your life for this contact with your interior to give clarity to your feelings and your ideas.
Silo_ La Reja, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2005
