Pleasure & Pain
April 15, 2005
Pleasure and pain are big issues in our lives — so big that you’d think we would understand them better. It’s because we let ourselves get pushed around by these things without really looking into them: That’s why we suffer so much. And one of the reasons we don’t look into them is because it’s hard. Pain especially is hard to look at. We’ve been dealing with pleasure and pain ever since we were born, and a lot of our habits for dealing with pleasure and pain are things we learned before we could even talk, before we could understand anything at all. So there’s a lot of ignorance here that we haven’t explored. Meditating is basically making up our minds to try and understand these two issues — which are basically one issue: the issue of feeling.