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PAIN PLEASURE AND RENUNCIATION

Richard
Magazine : Mother of All
Language : English
Volume Number : 8
Month : July
Issue Number : 3
Year : 2009

From the level of ordinary humanity the lives of saints appear puzzling and enigmatic. The values of the sage are so different from those of most people that his action and attitude often seem to contradict the most fundamental rules of conventional wisdom. How completely the holy man reserves the normal order of things is well reflected by Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita when he proclaims to Arjuna, “In the dark night all beings awake to light the tranquil man. But what is day to other beings is night for the sage who sees”.

This reversal of values is nowhere more apparent than in the realm of physical pain and suffering where the ordinary man will go to any lengths to avoid pain, the saints and sadhakas of all religions have shown a curious indifference to their own suffering, at times even seeming to court it and compound it as if the normal share of earthly woes were not sufficient and needed to be artificially supplemented by beds of nails, interminable fasts, hair suits, sleepless vigils and the like. Invariably this self-inflicted ‘torture’ has been regarded by the normal mass of humanity with a wide eyed perplexity. Nothing in the world could be more incomprehensible than the spectacle of a fellow being adding on to his own odious burden of pain! In recent times, this perplexity has given way to the ‘scientific’ certainty that all these things are, after all, only psychopathological symptoms of repressed guilt since no man in his right mind, it is reasoned, could possibly act to lessen his own pleasure or increase his own pain. That some of these phenomena can indeed be usefully accounted for in this manner is clear to anyone who is familiar with the morbid and life denying excesses that pious zeal has led a number of its unstable victims. But, that many persons of undeniable sanity, if not sanctity as well, have shown a remarkable indifference to physical pain is no less clear, as the lives of spiritual guides of mankind bear ample witness. In the end, what we are left with is an enigma that is most utterly distasteful to the average man, that which is most insane in his eyes and unthinkable – namely to treat pain as if it were equal to pleasure – is precisely the goal of the mystic. Let us turn once again to Lord Krishna in the Gita as he spells out the idea clearly for Arjuna:

“The man whom these cannot move, whose soul is 

Beyond pleasure and pain is worthy of life Eternity”

The ultimate goal then is neither to strive after pleasure and shin pain as most of us do or to strive after pain and shun pleasure as some spiritual aspirants do, but to remain above and beyond the reach of both of them. If the aspiring saint seems to invite suffering at times and takes a positive satisfaction in it, that is only to counteract his own native feelings of aversion toward that which is unpleasant, to reverse the habitual flow of his thoughts striving for joy and shunning pain. It is surely done with the hope that familiarity will lead to an increasing acceptance of “the darker side of life”. As Mother has pointed out in this regard: “Pain is acutely felt when we experience affliction for the first time, but encountered after they cease to cause suffering since we get accustomed to them……… or more poetically on another occasion…………. To worship the Goddess of patience, sorrows are the offering. “Still, Amma never counsels that we her children do anything to artificially add to our own suffering or engage in exaggerated austerities with the hope they will somehow quicken the normal course of spiritual evolution. In the long run Shakti is the best physician and the attitude to strive for, according to Mother, is the acceptance of what comes to us naturally with the confidence that the all knowing and compassionate force which runs the universe will not neglect to grant us whatever experiences are needed at any given time. To cultivate either pleasure or pain is implicitly to assume that one is a better engineer of destiny than destiny itself. To surrender confidently to whatever is happening at the moment, whether that happens to be pleasurable or painful, on the other hand is the way of harmony, at once the path and also the goal. The, goal, because at the very moment we cease our efforts to fight off the one and reduce the other pain loses its sting and pleasure its enticement and they both become what they were all along momentary phenomena fleeting insubstantially across the vast and luminous background which is our own essential nature..

This realisation, however, did not arrive overnight, as indeed the mental habits which stand in its way, were not formed in such haste either. It comes as the result of a long process of wearing away from the materialistic values which have sustained us and form the very bedrock of the culture we live in. As long as our brief sojourn on earth is viewed even to some extent (as it almost universally is) as an opportunity to grab a few enjoyments quietly while the chance lasts, then pleasure and pain are firmly entrenched as the reigning powers and no premature and violent attempts at “storming the fort” will be to any effect. What finally weakens their grip on us is not a frontal attack but rather the slowly gained intention born of repeated enquiry into the nature or experience that the pleasures which we so yearn for cannot be sustained and the suffering we try so hard to avoid cannot be avoided and that to struggle to sustain what cannot be sustained and to avoid what cannot be avoided is, after all, not worth the trouble. This is precisely the realisation that sent the young prince of the sakya clan off into forest and it is the same Truth which, in one form or other has inspired all of the great mystics to set out on their quest. It is not quite accurate to say that the future Buddha (or any saint for that matter) fled from the pleasures of the court to live the life of a wanderer and renunciation. It is closer to the truth to say that the pleasures of the princely life fled the Buddha when he found out their insubstantial nature just as a camouflaged hare will flee the fox when he realises that his disguise is discovered.

And so it is that true renunciation never appears as such to the one who does the renouncing but only to the outsider. When we feel as if we are giving something up then that very feeling ought to be as a warning signal that tells us to reconsider our motives and be quite certain that we are not just pushing some temporarily inconvenient habits and attachments away from us only to have them snap back violently like a rubber band the moment the tension of our ascetic resolve is momentarily relaxed. On questions of renunciation the motivation is invariably more important than the act itself. As Mother has accurately put it “One should not wander because the Buddha wandered. One should wander as he wanders.” Of course in order to do that one must be a Buddha, and Buddhas in any age are rare indeed. Their imitations, on the other hand, are numerous since it has always been a temptation to believe that by mimicking the outer actions of the saints we can become saints ourselves. In truth, however, this is to put the cart before the horse because the actions of the saints came as a result of their inner qualities and not the other way round.

As a rule, Mother does not encourage world renouncing asceticism and she generally tries to dissuade those who would abandon home and family in the hope of stimulating the spiritual life thereby. She tells us that it is better to cultivate the qualities of detachment and solitude where we are than to seek them in some far off place or in the change of clothes to ochre robes. All too often as Mother points out it is not a genuine inner urge to renounce so much as the pain and unpleasantness of life which makes us want to flee from what we know in search of some imagined trouble-free environment elsewhere. But the one who flees his troubles will be pursued by troubles wherever he goes as a dog is pursued by his own tail. We habitually think of our trouble as something external and separate from us while in fact they are integral parts of ourselves. We cannot flee from them because it is precisely the urge to flee from what is troublesome and crave for what is pleasant that is the cause of all our suffering in the first place.

The gardener who cuts off the shoots but leaves the roots knows very well that he can expect a fresh crop of weeds in very short order. Similarly, the aspirant who runs away from the world can be sure that the world will not fail to spring up before him wherever he happens to go. For the world was not as he might have thought, a wife, a job or a house full of children. The world is his own capacity for serving these undesirable things, his habit of separating things into good and bad, pleasant and unpleasant. This capacity for illusion, as many a budding monk has learnt to his chagrin, works just as well in a forest retreat or Himalayan cave as it does in the crowded cities of men.

What we learn, in fact, if we pause long enough in our feverish desire to flee in order to ponder a bit over the true significance of renunciation is that we have been mistaking the symbol for what it symbolises, the jar for its contents. The City that must be fled is not the one of brick and concrete, of men and women but the one formed of the crowded maze of prejudices and opinions, the squalid mental prisons that we have built up around ourselves blocking out the sun of truth and enclosing the infinite in petty cubicles of thought. The family that stands in our way is not father, mother, wife, daughter and son but our own limiting attachments to the five senses which make us think that no meaning exists, or exalted aims in life outside of touching, tasting, hearing and smelling. The task which exhausts and drains us and leaves the spirit dry and empty is not to be found in factory or field, in office or home, it is rather the endless Sisyphean labour which makes us bear in imagination that which is borne by the Lord in fact the whole terrible burden of ourselves and our world.

But while the external renunciation seems at least straightforward and practical, the demands of the inner renunciation puzzle us. A simple brilliant sword thrust of the will and I can sever myself from family, friends and nation but what is the stroke by which the sword of will severs itself? The more we contemplate the truly revolutionary demands of spiritual life the less they seem to be within our power to fulfil. We begin to wonder if all the talk about Sadhana and liberation is not just empty talk after all – an elaborate, heist, perpetrated on unsuspecting innocents as ourselves to keep us racing about wearily like dogs chasing their own tails for the idle amusement of an indifferent God. We might very likely drop the whole questionable business at this point and many do. But if we resist the temptation to flee, if we face squarely the implications of the growing sense of helplessness, if we surrender without restlessness to our own impotence something interesting happens, a curious peace descends, a light shines where there was only confusion before and we realise that inadvertently without knowing what is happening, by the grace of a power beyond our own, we have been propelled out into the spiritual path in a genuine sense for the first time.

For the very movement we stop, even for an instant our incessant efforts to remake the world and ourselves according to our own image of how they should be, we discover, to our surprise however restfully and obscurely at first that the one who made the world and ourselves in his own image has made them perfectly as it is without our least assistance or interference. From that moment onwards we are not overly concerned with questions of pleasure and pain, attachment and renunciation. We have given up neither our pleasures or pains. We have simply come to realise that whatever is God, and so have ceased to pick and choose.

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