pleasure v pain

Buddha’s Truths Pertain To All Life

Buddha’s Truths apply to all Earth’s creatures, although only humans need to have truth stipulated. For me, this suggests that our need for “Truth” is a symptom of something we feel missing. For that reason, considering the widest possible scope of these truths gives helpful context for their application – ‘profound sameness’, as chapter 56 […]

Emotion Speaks… Literally

I learned to speak a number of languages during my traveling years. Learning a language in country ‘on the job’, so to speak, is an easy, quick and enjoyable way to learn. During those years, my interest was to communicate—not eloquently mind you, but just enough to get by. Several hundred words and some fearless […]

Earn It to Learn It

Knowing, in the Taoist sense of the word, is not knowledge per se. As chapter 15 puts it, Of old, the adept student was minutely subtle, open and deep beyond knowledge. Times are different now. Our modern electrified pace of life is continuously updating every facet of human knowledge. However, this is not the case […]

Discomfort and Pain

The Science News’ article Hurt Blocker got me thinking about pain and the ways we deal with it. While this research is really about physical pain, the principle applies to all pain. How we deal with discomfort and pain results in numerous unintended consequences. If we knew at what point, in our avoidance of discomfort, […]

Opiate of the Masses

Karl Marx said religion was the opiate of the masses. I say it is prosperity, not religion, which is the opiate of the masses. The United States has experienced decades of unprecedented prosperity. Indeed, most people have lived their whole lives accustomed to what is actually a historically rare era of unusual affluence. Now, the […]

The Wealthy Poor

I sometimes wonder why rich people often keep upping the ante, buying increasingly more expensive things. It follows a progression I first noticed when I experienced my own wealth upgrade after arriving in Japan (see Peaches and Pleasure). It is a fact of life — we convert any upgrade in our standard of living into […]

Naturally Unnatural, Naturally!

Sometimes I hear people opine on what is natural or unnatural human behavior. Doesn’t this depend on what part of the elephant one currently feeling? Elephant parables aside, I see this issue as emerging layers of the onion of reality. (See Tao as Emergent Property.) Let’s sort this out… Like all animals, humans are naturally […]

Fear Is The Bottom Line

There is more to fear than meets the eye. We often associate the symptoms of fear (the reactions fear initiates) as the fear itself. This evokes mental images of fear as being screaming and fleeing experiences. Actually, the screaming and fleeing are reactions to feeling fear, not fear itself. The other most common reaction to […]

Exquisite Balance

I never ever use the word exquisite, but this morning while standing on my head I thought, “How exquisite this moment of perfect balance feels”. I went on to consider other facets of life such as working, eating, speaking, and shopping. In all cases, balance is possible, but is often only partial and so seldom […]

Chairs: One of Our Big Mistakes

The use of chairs in the West is ubiquitous. One of the most important life style changes I ever made was giving up my use of the chair fifty years ago. Chairs and sit down toilets are good examples of my motto, ‘short term pleasure attracts long term pain; short term pain attracts long term […]

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pleasure v pain