I promised myself I would read the Phaedo after the recent events. Scanning the begining yesterday I was interested to see Socrates' opening contemplation: after being released from his chains and feeling the life coming back into his leg, he observes how closely pain and pleasure are associated - where there is one the other is sure to follow. It is as if the creature has two heads.
Well there we are, what more do I need. You see what the last 9 years have done is virtually obliterate the childhood hope that I had that bliss abiding was possible in this world. After reading too many fairy tales and their ilk, one is left with this dream of eternal happiness and invariabley that through romantic love - even while ones intellectual self knows perfectly better. I had my intellectual self fooled by the depth and complexity of that romance I feel.
If I do finally kill the dream and accept that where there is pleasure their is pain, and without pain there cannot be pleasure then I experience now simply the mirror of the pleasures I experienced 9 years ago. The beast whether it be pain or pleasure be the same. That beast ofcourse is desire. It brings us both pain and pleasure, and the stronger the desire the greater the two. I knew as the roller-coaster set off 9 years ago that I probably could not handle what came next. The question has been do I get stronger the face the forces of such high energy travel, or do I see the peace of not riding at all. Unsure as yet...
What exactly was Buddha teaching? They call him the desireless one: one might think that he attained his peaceful abiding by killing the serpent with two heads so that he had neither pleasures nor pains. His two final tests as the hands of Mara - the demoness of illusion - were her demons and daughters; repulsion and attraction: which he tackled with compassion and non-attachment. On the other hand you too often find the belief that his path simply ends suffering and leaves you pleasure.
Getting it together with the ex physically yesterday, and testing that theory of giving; it was good but it was not so good as to sell my soul over this. Temptations may be great but the boy aint becoming a man for any temporary desire or woman. It will be for himself and for immutable truth and eternity alone. Afterall when I am dead what use will all these petty desires have been, and my intellect will no longer be pursuaded that there is immortality in all this.
Love is a much harder, stronger, more patient, giving, peaceful and wiser thing than the old romantic would have wanted. There is no abandoning to the bliss here, that is only the soft seductive call of Mara.
The man who gathers flowers (of sensual pleasure), whose mind is distracted, and who is insatiate in desires, the Destroyer brings under his sway. [48]
As a bee without harming the flower, its colours or scent, flies away, collecting only the honey, even so should the sage wander in the village. [49]
Dhammapada
I can only understand this to mean that there are two types of pleasure. There are those pleasures we may attain my feeding a desire; the other head of the demon being pain. There are those pleasures which arise within the mind, which have no object and which are gained not through the external "thing", but rather through the letting go of the thing. I have not read this, it is unclear.
The first move is ascetism, of which I am well happy with. But its movement away from the other world of sensory excitement means that I learn nothing of that other world, and invariably I am drawn back to explore. Buddha at least was finished with the sensory before his ascetism. I am neither satisfied, nor unsatisfied with either yet: though maybe getting tired of the sensory world.
If the boy becomes a man then, it is only to gain full retirement from that world, after which the other way follows surely, and after that the middle and full appreciation of the two heads of Mara.
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