insight (and a QUESTION) about pleasure and how it's keeping us from enlightenment

[Manjushri]

TL;DR Drop your clinging to pleasure to get closer to attaining liberation. Stop trying to gauge experience and maximize pleasue. Just be. Question is in the last paragraph. 

so, something 'bad' happens (eg shit decision, i usually get angry at myself for making shit decisions!) and even 2hrs later I'm spinning it in my head. it's long gone but I'm keeping it it alive. even minute things cause suffering... 'I should've gone home an hour ago, wouldn't of have eaten outside and spent money and wasted an hour and got tired and then in an even bigger slump because i wasted time, didn't accomplish anything, got tired and basically ruined my evening' 

look at the monkey chatter!!! The situation is pretty neutral if you detach yourself from it. Only when you start taking it personally, you suffer

what happens to me more and more often from practice is that my mind is trained so i know better, so i let go. or I'm too much in the present to care, even though (if we take that time and causality exist) the present moment was gravely affected by my past mistake.  

BUT THEN! Why do I consider that a mistake? That's where the inquiry starts. It's basically a mistake because i minimized my present and future pleasure. Not in the shit hedonistic way, but in the more 'enlightened hedonism (read : antic philosophy) way'. Every time I was bitching about something it was about pleasure. Let me try to explain it. Me going home earlier would of have meant more pleasure, because I wouldn't of have gotten tired, wasted time, expended energy etc. 

Even the utility categories such as optimal mental states and time (to clarify, eg : you're studying, so you need the optimal conditions for it. either u gonna use neurotropics or biohack or just ride the wave of when clear and energized mental states come. tiredness is a shit state for productivity, time is valuable if you're looking solely at PRODUCTIVITY and OUTPUT, future oriented, not present) it boils down to PLEASURE. 

now getting rid of the clinging to pleasure, I can sense the tremendous liberation in it. When you stop looking subconsciously GAUGING experience as in 'ooh this is good, this is bad, why did this happen, this cold is gonna ruin my weekend' and trying to maximize pleasure. Not talking about hedonists, more about everybody who is caught in the cycle of desire-aversion. 

And why do I want pleasure rather than unpleasant sensations? Oh shit! We're going deeper. In most people's cases that I've enquired, they think the headache is going to last forever so they resist it. 

What's really interesting is that in my case, I usually resist unpleasant sensations is because I think they're going to have some kind of consequence in the future. EG it's chilly outside, the cold is an unpleasant sensation (leaning towards neutral) and I'm shivering. What my mind does is GAUGE the experience and attach an implication. This thing that's happening now is going to affect my health (thus minimize my pleasure), so I don't like it! making the sensation unpleasant. This is all happening behind the scenes, it seems to me - sometimes it's conscious too.

Otherwise, shivering is pretty neutral tbh. 

How do you get over this though? It seems pretty hard-wired for survival to care about the consequences of things, gauging experiences and trying to maximize pleasure. Otherwise you're gonna starve to death observing that hunger, or love the sunshine the entire summer and then die in the winter not having prepared a shelter and extra food ... Not that there's anything inherently bad about that, though. 

 

Edited November 9, 2018 by Gligorije