Why People Respond More To Pleasure

[Razard86]

The feeling of separation, and the massively used model of a physical, matter based reality creates a large amount of fear and a Me Against The World mentality/reality. As such most people view life as a battle zone, and home their hospital, their rest and relaxation to recuperate from the battle field. I know for me personally this was my reality for a large portion of my life but for some bizarre reason I sought truth even in the face of extreme pain but I too also sought rest and relaxation as well.

Since most people are extremely self-critical of themselves, most people actually need their self-critical thoughts to be below the surface otherwise they would probably commit suicide. When people experience what is called "bad trips" they are only facing their own self-critical thoughts and the more you have the more hellish the experience. I'm sorry to say but that is how this game was designed so I am not blaming you for it, but I am bringing to awareness you can do something about it. The path to pleasure in this dream is to face pain. Its almost like a rule that the path to pleasure always involves pain. Those who get the most pleasure also seem to have experienced the most pain as well. So paradoxical this life is, its almost laughable.

Anyway since most people you meet are in hell, you need to give them some heaven for them to ever open up to you at all. Got a friend who is a drunk you want to help get off that addiction? Listing them all the reasons why what they are doing is destroying their life won't work. Patience, openness in communication, receptivity, and lack of judgment is what they need. Its infuriating when someone you love is hurting themselves and you have to be patient. When they hurt you hurt, but just like all things, this too shall pass if you have the patience of a saint!!! 

What I am loving about life, is it keeps teaching me what love is, and what truth is and it does it so obviously and you can only receive it from a place unsullied by ego. Ego is agenda, ego is resistance, ego is preference, ego is force, ego is desire to control, ego is close-mindedness, ego is accusatory and denial of actions, ego is impatience, ego is annoyance, ego is misunderstanding, all these I have learned from personal experience. Life is a really great teacher if you listen. So I have said before, wisdom is whatever action that is taken that increases self-love. This means whatever action you do that switches the state of consciousness of others to a more loving accepting state. 

Here is an absolute, your ability to handle the painful, rough aspects of the truth, is equivalent to your current state of love. Since most people are at a low state of love, they need a lot of pleasure to build them up. The problem is, that pleasure is never enough because they are constantly subconsciously building up pain in the form of self-judgment and so need to constantly seek pleasure to ward off that pain and thus are stuck in an infinite loop of pleasure seeking. If you are ever engaged in working with people full of self-judgment understand they are only mean, irritable, and selfish because they are full of self-judgment. The vile behavior they are projecting outward is a result of them suffering their own vile inner talk and they need to release it to get some rest. I'm not saying it is right, but it is a necessity for their survival and sanity. 

Many people ask why should I be good? Easy, because goodness is peace, peace with yourself and others. Why should I detach from ego? Because Ego is conflict and lack of peace. In fact here is a good barometer for you to know if you are in ego, your peace is disturbed!!! The other barometer is you have a desire to protect or defend something absolutely, instead of relatively. Any hard stance will most likely reek of ego so beware. Egos need pleasure because they are constantly at war, so anytime you are in the process of healing and awakening the egoic, the lure will be pleasure not pain. Self-righteousness, lecturing, moralizing is not going to awaken God from within, only compassion. Critique, and direction can only be taken when the person is in an open state, in a state of receptivity which can only exist when there is security. That security is self-love. So when one has overcome their own self-judgments can they be open to even hear what is being said. 

People  misunderstand you often because they have no desire to understand you. Open-mindedness has its own pace, and I am learning constantly through observation why things are the way they are. Each state of consciousness expresses itself a certain way, and it cannot be any other way as it is currently. 

Edited December 27, 2022 by Razard86

[TheAlchemist]

Great post, thanks for this.

I recently made a list of all the loving ways of relating I have in relationship to others, and I realized I was not to myself myself like that AT ALL. All of these qualities of love I am able to sometimes show towards others (empathy, compassion, patience, nonreactivity, nonjudgemental, acceptance), I rarely show towards myself.

In fact I relate to myself in the complete opposite way often. Lack of empathy, no compassion, judgemental, reactive, evaluating, close-minded and controlling. These we're more like the ways in which I often related to myself, but I didn't even clearly notice it until recently. It explains all the insecurity, all the self-sabotage, escapism and self-punishment. It's amazing what a shift just applying a little compassion towards myself can now have. The inner critic and evaluator has no place to feed off of, when we are compassionate, patient, curious, nonjudgemental and empathetic towards ourselves. 

Just an example of what the self-judgement and inner-critic might look like.

Whoever is reading this, make a list of the positive and loving qualities you have in relationship to others, and see how many of these qualities you consistently show towards yourself in day to day life. 

Edited December 26, 2022 by TheAlchemist

[Razard86]

On 12/26/2022 at 1:02 AM, TheAlchemist said:

Great post, thanks for this.

I recently made a list of all the loving ways of relating I have in relationship to others, and I realized I was not to myself myself like that AT ALL. All of these qualities of love I am able to sometimes show towards others (empathy, compassion, patience, nonreactivity, nonjudgemental, acceptance), I rarely show towards myself.

In fact I relate to myself in the complete opposite way often. Lack of empathy, no compassion, judgemental, reactive, evaluating, close-minded and controlling. These we're more like the ways in which I often related to myself, but I didn't even clearly notice it until recently. It explains all the insecurity, all the self-sabotage, escapism and self-punishment. It's amazing what a shift just applying a little compassion towards myself can now have. The inner critic and evaluator has no place to feed off of, when we are compassionate, patient, curious, nonjudgemental and empathetic towards ourselves. 

Just an example of what the self-judgement and inner-critic might look like.

Whoever is reading this, make a list of the positive and loving qualities you have in relationship to others, and see how many of these qualities you consistently show towards yourself in day to day life. 

Thanks for the reply, I have a buffer for the point you made. "make a list of the positive and loving qualities you have in relationship to others, and see how many of these qualities you consistently show towards yourself in day to day life." Also how about this? How often do you notice those positive and loving qualities you have in comparison to the negative qualities?

Most people fear being proud of themselves because they are afraid to be arrogant so they force themselves to be humble by purposefully focusing on what they don't like about themselves, resisting all praise from others, and being overly critical in an attempt to be "perfect" or "good." This means they view themselves as something to be fixed or corrected. 

A lot of people live their entire lives this way, its a sad thing to realize but the traps that others fall in, recognize and avoid them for yourself.