It Feels Good

We want to go to the moon, and do the other things, not because they are easy, not because they are hard, but because they feel good.

This is what J.F.K. should have said. In the TV series "Last man standing" last night one of the contestants said how good it felt to win the wrestling contest. Of course his opponent felt bad and that is the absurdity of contest that the result viewed one way is good and viewed the other is bad. How we feel is just the result of a view point. Fixation upon our own view point ties us into the dualism, but any by stander can see the two sides.

We went to the moon, we start wars, we kill, Beethoven wrote his symphonies, we listen to those symponies, we understood physics and Relativity, we have families ... because it feels good and for no other reason. This is the playing field of human biological existence. That desire for what feels good and its corollary - the running from what feels bad - is what drives us around the circle of daily life like a dog chained to a post. Fixation upon our own feeling good and bad makes the play complete and we are driven endlessly and unknowingly by the tight reigns of that master.

That picture of the donkey with a carrot tied before its eyes trudging on toward its unachievable goal whilst carrying its master is a metaphor for so much. I wish I could find a copy of that picture. Whether it is promise of future riches which ties us into busy business whilst we carry the weight of the aristocractic investors upon our back, or more profoundly the endless journeying toward the goal of feeling good carrying our enslaved selves upon our backs it is the same sight to the outsider looking in.

Liberation must be the breaking of that tether, liberation from the selfish fixation upon our own feeling good and feeling bad, to see the boundless horizon in which looked at one way it is good and looked at another it is bad. The freedom that comes from an expansive view that includes all people and places no point of view above another. That is the non-dualism of Hinduism, Buddhism and Western Philosophy the medicine for the very human illness of partiality and enslavement.