Not chasing pleasure nor avoiding pain
Jeroen
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlands Veteran
One thing that I recently read in Nisargadatta’s book I Am That is that “desire is the memory of pleasure, and fear is the memory of pain”. I’ve for a long time held with a kind of stoicism, of neither chasing pleasure nor avoiding pain, but instead being like a tree and letting the sunshine and the rain come and go as they please.
Now I don’t know where this attitude came from, I haven’t been exposed to real stoic philosophy at any point in my life, but somewhere in my childhood it came to me that this was the way to be in life. This basic enduring has sometimes been good for me, it has kept me from chasing sex or being easily addicted, but it has also had downsides, like when my knees started playing up and I didn’t go see a fysio for a year.
In enduring the sunshine and the rain, and not being easily moved, I have found a kind of wisdom about the passing nature of things. I have been a witness to good events and bad, and have found that with patience personal happiness tends to return.
Comments
I'm in the same camp. I've been looking at this through the Big 5 personality lens lately. Like introversion/extroversion another personality spectrum is emotional stability/neuroticism. I'm an introvert, but I recognize that all things have strengths and weaknesses. I'll never be an extrovert but in order to flourish and prosper in this world I need to develop some extroverted skills.
Likewise as someone who falls on and cultivates qualities of emotional stability there are pros and cons like you mention. Taking things in stride vs not taking care of problems. I think the attitude that helps me be more proactive is self compassion combined with a longer term outlook. Future me will be happier if current me takes steps now to address problems. Obsession or perfectionism hasn't been an issue, my natural temperament I think provides some immunity.
Yes, self compassion, and necessity. I act on things which are needful. Shopping, vacuum cleaning, medical supplies, banking, taxes, garbage disposal.
Happiness for me has tended to be about giving attention on the good things in life, and just letting the bad things come and go, taking note of them without letting them take over. That way, the good things get bigger in your optics, and the bad things become more bearable.
Nothing lasts, as Terence McKenna said — nothing lasts. And that is good, that the old and out-dated makes place for the young and the new. It is an engine with which Mother Nature keeps fitting things together in working systems of plants and animals.
And so it is that many problems solve themselves with time. Being aware of the world around you can tell you which things are likely to resolve on their own, and which require intervention.
I came across a passage in Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now which was about awareness and coming to inhabit the body, which made a lot of sense to me. He says that when you give attention to the inner body - feeling the body from the inside as it were - you eventually come to make contact with the body’s inner energy field, which leads you to a contact with limitless Being.
Now that makes a lot more sense to be than being told “you are not the body” and then ending up rejecting the body. After all, the body is the locus of our awareness, it is our temple on Earth. Rejecting it would lead to a kind of disembodied being. It makes more sense to me to give attention to feeling the body truely, to inhabit it fully first.
Here is a practice he gives…
The world doesn't have to be either/or. If a technique makes sense to you that doesn't necessarily mean it is the one true path and others are inferior.
From a Madhyamika perspective the purpose of the Buddha's negating approach is so you don't then cling on to a subtler form of self reification.
I've done this practice on occasion and found it to be very regenerative and restorative. Kind of like really resting deeply while being awake. Hallelujah, no phones necessary!
Sometimes, I think when sufficiently and successfully refocusing from the gross suffering/impurities/mundane mind, the sense of the "inner body" registers similarly or the same as a sense of love.
I’ve been trying it the last few days, but I’m finding that my body feels more restored when I don’t give it any attention at all, and just get myself lost in doing something like gardening.
We just had our first snows of the year… the air temperature has been below zero for most of the day. The snow is melting on contact with the ground but we had some sustained flurries.
I found this exercise helpful too…