On Pleasure and Pain

Never admit the pain,
Bury it deep;
Only the weak complain,
Complaint is cheap.
Cover thy wound, fold down
Its curtained place;
Silence is still a crown,
Courage a grace.

- Mary Gilmore (1865-1962), Australian Poet

Something I read recently made me recall this poem from my 8th or 9th grade school textbook. I remember it word-to-word, not just because it is short but also because the teacher who interpreted it for us seemed to like it a lot. It was visible in the interest with which she spoke about it as opposed to other things that were in the syllabus.

The poem advocates a stoic courage and an ability to deal with pain with a silence forced upon oneself. It advocates hiding one’s wounds from the view of the world, because we know how ruthless the world is. It does not care about the wounds that one carries. On the contrary, it inflicts more wounds once it realizes how frail one is. In saying “Never admit the pain, Bury it deep” the poet seems to be advising us to bury the pain so deep that not only is it not visible to the outside world but also so that we can therefore have the ability to deny or hide the pain from our own selves. It sees this as strength, and loathes complaining as cheap and a sign of weakness.

This kind of stoic courage has helped me on many occasions in my life. I am sure many people adopt the same approach. However, then as well as now, there seems to me something seriously wrong with this approach to dealing with pain, although I perhaps still resort to it sometimes.

All of us are hurt. We experience pain right from the time we are born. Being born itself is such a painful and traumatic process. We are pushed out from our mother’s womb, which is such a comfortable and secure place, into this world. The first thing we do is cry. As babies, we experience pain even though the concept of “I” has not yet fully developed. For several months, a baby does not know that it is a separate entity from the world. Experience of pleasure and pain play a critical role in the development of the concept of “I”. Through such experiences we realize how the world is separate from us, that we are a distinct entity upon which pleasure and pain are bombarded. Later, as we get more integrated with society, the development of the process of thought and the thinker (an entity created by thought itself) also plays an important role in strengthening the “I”.

We are born with a high sensitivity. We continue to experience pleasure and pain all through life - only perhaps less keenly as we grow older. We see pleasure as something good, desirable, and pain as something to be avoided. We either run away from it or develop strategies to deal or fight with it. In doing so, we lose our sensitivity and become thick-skinned and hard-hearted – not sensitive even to our own pain, forget others. We want pleasure, comfort, security… And in trying to have this we become clever, escapist, insensitive, thoughtless, blind… We do not realize that pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin. We cannot have one without the other. The pursuit of comfort and security, material as well as psychological, is such a tortuous process, filled with conflict, uncertainty and effort. And it ultimately leads to pain. Pain remains the central fact of human life.

One may say that one is not pursuing pleasure or comfort, and that we just want to be happy, content. But upon looking carefully within, one realizes that this is just a form of self-deception. One may not be greedy or covetous, but one still wants happiness through pleasure. We confuse the two. Pleasure can be pursued or sought. But happiness does not come from seeking. One cannot go to it. It comes to us. And it comes to us, only if it wishes, as a kind of side-effect of something else, of a different quality within oneself than one which is always “seeking” or “becoming” something. One need not name this quality – why give it a name? If we give it a name, a word, then again our clever minds will snatch upon it and bring it within the realm of thought, as something to be pursued or achieved. It is easy to be firm or stubborn and pursue something; it is far more difficult not to do that and instead try to understand why one wants pleasure, happiness (or whatever you want to call it) in the first place.

To quote J. Krishnamurti, “I have been hurt all my life, I am sensitive - you know what hurt is, the wounds that one receives, and what effect it has in later life. I have been hurt. I can deal with superficial hurts fairly intelligently. I know what to do. I either resist, build a wall around myself, isolate myself so that I will never be hurt, or grow a thick skin - which most people do. But behind that they are wounded deeply.” The Buddha was perhaps trying to convey the same thing by saying that “Life is suffering (Dukkha).” It is significant that this is the first of the ‘four noble truths’ that he preached.

Most of us do not even realize that we are in sorrow. Sorrow is the human condition. We either try to overcome it or explain away our suffering. And so we never understand it.

Some of us are good at seeking escapes. Or to put it another way, we are successful at escaping and so we do not even realize that we are being escapist.

Having beliefs and clinging to them is being escapist. A belief is not a fact. For example, does one believe that fire is hot or does one know it as a fact? Isn’t it stupid to say “I believe fire is hot.”? We have beliefs only about things that we do not know anything about. We do not know what love is or what truth is and so we have beliefs or ideas about it. If we want to know what love is or what truth is one has to know oneself first – and we do not want to do that because that is not the easy way. So we seek escapes by believing in this and that… and engaging in action based on that, which only adds to the chaos although one may think otherwise.

Being committed to some idea or values is also being escapist. Why do we choose some idea or value? It is because by believing in or being committed to it we hope to achieve something. Behind that, what we are still seeking is comfort or security. We are disturbed by the chaos of life, and so we try to escape from it rather than face the reality within ourselves. By conforming to some pattern based on conditioning, we become half-dead human beings. Escape can take various forms – seeking pleasure or not seeking pleasure, seeking money or some object or not seeking it, seeking love or not seeking it, seeking comforts of the city or seeking an idealistic rural life, wanting something from someone or not wanting it and so on… We all indulge in being escapist in some form or another. Even pursuing spirituality is an escape.

There is no limit to the ways in which one can escape. We seem to have an ingrained tendency towards flight from disturbance rather than understanding oneself. Perhaps it is a natural and genetically encoded impulse in human beings. But that makes it all the important for us to see the danger of it. What is wrong with being disturbed? Unless we are disturbed, we will not have the energy to change and understand the cause of the disturbance. Understanding oneself means investigating into one’s psychological processes and instincts. This leads to self-knowledge or freedom. It leads to an understanding of life that is different from that which most people are used to. (In using the word “life” I am including death in it because death is not the opposite of life or something separate from it. It is a part of life.) That is the only basis upon which one can engage in right action or the foundation upon which one can build one’s life. Then whatever action one engages in is right action. The same action, if it does not come from self-knowledge is mere conformity with the intention of achieving something and thus being secure, which leads to more chaos/confusion.

However, when we look within ourselves, we may see many things that are ugly. It is difficult to simply look at the fact, or what-is, without any acceptance, justification, condemnation or running away. Similarly, it is also difficult not to turn self-knowledge into another thing that needs to be achieved or pursued by means of a path, system or method. I know this problem only too well and probably the way I am struggling to overcome it is also a part of the problem. In the spiritual realm, the effort to do something does not accomplish anything. As Krishnamurti said, “It is the truth that frees, not your effort to be free.”

There is no easy way out. There is no refuge – neither outside nor within.