Prisoners of Pleasure

Pleasure is overrated, empty and a distraction at best. You could define pleasure as anything that comes from sense-gratification and distracts you from reality. I am not against pleasure, but when it is pursued as the only objective in life, it leads to imbalance and ultimately, disaster. Most of us are prisoners of pleasure, the elusive impostor, masquerading as happiness, but what it inevitably leads to is pain and stunts your growth as a person. It torments you, makes an addict out of you, distorts the truth, breaks peace and leaves you alone in a corner. Only when you awaken to this slow poisoning of pleasure, that has slowly distorted your mind, do you start thinking clearly. Those who have pursued pleasure and let it be their master, can understand best, what I am trying to say.

You can only understand it viscerally, when you have trudged on the pleasure path for long and lost yourself completely, vacillating between a pleasurable high and boredom, feeling empty inside. One classic sign of a pleasurable sensation is no matter how much you engage in it, you are always left feeling just as empty, as you did before. In my experience, what helps us cut through the veil of 'maya (illusion)', 'mara (the symbolic lord of the realm of desire in Buddhist philosophy)' or pleasure, is the fact that you have got a very limited time to live.

Would you spend your time being seduced by any kind of pleasure, when you know you've got a few days to live? What is most important to you? The pleasurable sensation right now or the lasting satisfaction and happiness you would get from doing things for people who really matter to you. Asking these questions, brings about a paradigm shift in our attitude towards life. Do you want instant gratification and pleasure, for a lifetime of pain, or would you rather take efforts right now, towards lasting peace later? It's all about the choices we make.

Identifying pleasure and happiness as inherently different things, is only the first step. If happiness is not pleasure and continuing pleasurable sensations, what is it really? Does it lie in ordering all external conditions to our liking?

If that is your idea of happiness, then you can look forward to eternal dissatisfaction, for external things are never going to be under your complete control. Like your body and your mind, they are all in a constant flux. Everything will wither away and all that will remain are your deeds. Death and impermanence are a reality, one has got to come to terms with. Nothing lasts. Period. Choose your priorities now and make amends. It is never too late. Impermanence has a way of separating all that matters from all that doesn't. Think about it, meditate on it. This is all that you ever need to know. That's the message of Buddha, the man who was one of the firsts to make a breakthrough in understanding the meaning of true happiness.

Peace and happiness can only be found in ordering and balancing the mind, which is the mediator, between our external and inner worlds. The Buddha says 'Mind is everything. What you think you become.' and 'Peace comes from within. Don't seek it without'. Let go of anger, greed and delusion, for they wreck everything. Cultivate wholesome thoughts of compassion, generosity and kindness within. If you analyze what the great master says, you will find wisdom and the power to achieve true inner peace and happiness in the luminous quality of the mind, which is 'pure awareness'.

However, the master can only show you the way, it is we who must strive on our own, to achieve inner peace. The secret is to look within, watch our minds, cultivate compassion and concentrate on the present moment, to give it our best. Learning to meditate on these truths everyday and bringing them into practice, will surely put you on the right path. To conclude, I leave you with another one of Buddha's liberating thoughts,

"It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you. ."