Not the ubiquitous placeholder text that has been in use since the dawn of printing but the underlying text from Cicero:
From Wikipedia we have this translation (with the Lorem ipsum placeholder text highlighted):
But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of reprobating pleasure and extolling pain arose. To do so, I will give you a complete account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness. No one rejects, dislikes or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences, or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure? [33] On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammeled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains.
So this text broadly proposes that man operates toward pleasure and away from pain. We can see this most obviously in animals, where you can use pleasure and pain to train creatures such at dogs. Tasty biscuits when they do something wanted, and a scolding and rejection when they do something unwanted. Quickly neurons rewire to give behaviour that leads to reward biscuits. I've heard it said this takes only 21 repetitions. So people who have unwanted reward mechanisms like smoking just need to reinforce a different reward/punishment mechanism just 21 times to rewire the neurons.
So far so good. But we can apply SRH here to see a problem. If we universalise and expand the scope to include itself, we can presume that Cicero the writer gained some pleasure from writing it, and we some pleasure from reading it, else why would we do it under the theory. And that suggests that all there is to this text is pleasure. It serves the same purpose as a nonsense poem, or a work of fiction where we follow the hero through perilous quests. All just for pleasure. Yet Cicero is not doing this for pleasure, he is talking "about" pleasure and that means the text cannot be applied to itself without running into SRH.
Normally we view the activities of Cicero here as trying to speak the "truth." Trying to say how things are. And the goal is being correct. Now it may be that there is secondary reward in being correct, but this cannot be the goal! If it is the goal then the value of Cicero's text just joins other pleasurable texts and activities, but we know the goal was not this. When we write "about" pleasure our goal cannot be pleasure by SRH!
And this has implications for what the text says. Cicero died about 100 years before Christ and he never learned about His death on the Cross. Cicero might say that Jesus suffered the temporary human suffering on the Cross so that he might rise to Heaven and the eternal bliss there. And that is one "small" way to think about this. But the larger way to think about this is that Jesus was illustrating a "truth" of the world - and there is that word "truth" that Cicero leaves out.
Buddha speaks like this, "expedient means" it is translated as. In the Lotus Sutra there is the parable of the burning house where a father lies about treasures (carts) outside to encourage his children out of the house. They complain outside that it was a lie, but the father explains it was to save their lives. So to Jesus?
Stories of beautiful heavens are like this. John Bunyan's Pilgrims Progress is allegorical and perhaps the vision of Heaven at the end is allegorical, but I think many people think of Heaven as a place they will go. All these Heavens are just doggie biscuits to encourage people to do what is right, but doggie biscuits are not the point, it is what the doggie biscuits are encouraging that is the goal.
Consider the evolutionary approach. We evolved pleasure and pain not for their own sakes, but as mechanisms to make the organism do what was best for its survival. Even in science there is no room for our lives being guided by just pleasure and pain!
This is the "small view" that is becoming engrained as the world sinks into ignorance in the 21st Century. There are people who live for pleasure alone! And they must think they were born as sentient being just to feel and experience pleasure, and when they die that serves only to stop the pleasure. The huge and complex body and being and world in fact exists just to extract pleasure. This simply does not make sense. Is there any pleasure in even realising that their whole existence is just about pleasure? This is the "small view."
The "large view" realises that all this is low tier stuff. The realm of amoeba and automata. What we are aware of is not the pleasure and pain, but the very existence of these things at all. To be aware of Pleasure and Pain them self is an infinitely greater thing than just the pleasure and pain. To be aware of them gives us freedom.
So we enter the next stage, as indeed did Buddha and the stage that has been of greatest interest in Human History. The liberation from pleasure and pain. When we see a drug addict selling up their whole lives, their self respect, their conscience and even their lives for pleasure we see what a lowly path pleasure is. The conspiratorial might even say the 21st Century ruling classes are using Pleasure and Pain to control us and focusing our lives on pleasure is all part of shrinking our freedom.
The initiate now thinks that freedom must be ignoring Pleasure and Pain. Or even more extreme seeking pain. Buddha starved himself for 6 years eating just a grain of rice each day. He says when he touched his belly he could feel his spine. I wonder whether this extreme period of starvation is what led to his eventual death many years later from mesenteric infarction.
There are many versions of this. Much is of the "delayed gratification" type. If I do not reward myself now, the reward will be greater in the future. I used to do this with water. I realised that drinking water when you were very thirsty was much more enjoyable than drinking it when not thirsty. So naturally we do not drink to increase the future pleasure and we seek thirst so that we can experience the joy of water more. Pleasure/Pain logic should actually lead all organisms to extremes of behaviour.
One immediate example of where Truth comes into Cicero is that the doctor tells us this will damage our kidneys. So we avoid the extreme pleasures of water so that we can preserve our kidneys. Why do we do this? Well Cicero would say so that we can keep enjoying other things, rather than the pain of kidney failure. But actually we do it out of some concept of self preservation, because it is "right".
Another thing happens also. After a while we lose the desire. The body does not hold on to desires for long. We get thirsty and then if we don't drink in about 10 mins the thirst goes. When eventually we do drink we get no pleasure! So the whole mechanism is very shaky anyway.
We can get rather lost if we just purse pleasure and pain in fact.
And other problem is the "greater hit." The body quickly adapts. It does not do 100% pleasure all the time, it normalises. So whatever we call "pleasurable" today if we keep experiencing it will become just normal, and we will need a greater quantity tomorrow for the same hit. Likewise with pain, whatever is intolerable today with continued experience becomes normal. There are no absolutes here. I find with sugar in tea for example the amounts keeps going up to get the sugar hit, until it is ridiculous and I get a new "dopamine" hit from quitting sugar all together. Ans so the cycles of the relativistic world of pleasure and pain continue pointlessly. This is no way to live.
Buddha's great realisation was Middle Way. He realised there was a sweet spot in the middle of Pleasure and Pain, a correct path, a "true" path (to use that world again), that lay between the extremes. That is not much help because while we have the extremes as gutters on either side of the road, it is a totally different skill to drive avoiding the gutters and to drive down the actual road. Middle Path is hard to find, it takes real skill to find it and drive down the road of life. That wisdom and taking the right amount of things, doing no harm, and seeking peace is very hard to come by and is famous in history.
Another angle to this again comes from Buddhism, the famous Dhammapada, Chapter 4 Flowers
48. The Destroyer brings under his sway the person of distracted mind who, insatiate in sense desires, only plucks the flowers (of pleasure).
49. As a bee gathers honey from the flower without injuring its colour or fragrance, even so the sage goes on his alms-round in the village.
The true path in life is not opposed to pleasure. How simple would it be just to punish oneself eternally, but it would make us cruel and bitter if we treated our self like this, and we would come to hate ourselves just as anyone else we treated like this would. There is pleasure and we accept that, it is part of life. Likewise there is pain. No amount of Cicero can stop us from falling ill, or from things breaking, or things not going the way we wanted. Pain also exists in this world. The true way is to accept things as they are. When pleasures happen we enjoy, when pains happen we endure. We do this from a position of Peace (that is also extremely hard to find, but it is where Middle Path takes us). The problem with Cicero is that we are subjects of Pleasure and Pain and we get turned this way and that by it. In fact pleasure and pain should leave us completely unaffected.
Again this is not to ignore pains and pleasures. One caveat is that pains may lead to reconsideration. If things are always going badly and there is pain this is a warning sign. We should re-examine the situation and our approach so as to improve. This is not to end the pain itself, any more than we fix the car tire pressure to turn off the warning light. we do it cos it is what is required. It is true that fixing the pressure turns off the warning signals, and it is true that living well stops the pain, but what was needed was the correct pressure and a good life.
There is Truth and that is our goal. It was Cicero's goal in writing what we wrote, it is my goal in writing this. It is true that Pleasure and Pain exist and play their part, but they are not the final goal, only sign posts along the way.
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And this makes sense of that greatest irony of spiritual practice, and indeed the biggest pit fall. Cory Muscara @corymuscara says in his list of 36 take aways from 6 months retreat:
23. Meditation is not about feeling good. It’s about feeling what you’re feeling with good awareness. Plot twist: Eventually that makes you feel good.
The reason is that "feeling good" is only a temporary conditional relative phenomenon. It has a cause, a beginning, some duration and an end. And to make things worse you habituate to it. You can't have the same feeling for long because the neurons simply stop firing once the point is made. It is just a doggy biscuit to encourage you to keep doing this.
The problem both in Buddha's time and now is that we get these Heavenly States and we think we have arrived at Heaven. Our ego claims that as a win, our goal and we get hooked on this and stop practicing properly. This final great hindrance means we can never finish the path because we take the sign posts to be the path. Buddha followed many practitioners in India on his own path and the story goes he perfected their teachings and saw this was still not the end. My understanding of that is that the end point is no end point. If you are teaching freedom then you cannot take anything with you and so there is nothing to teach. Many teachers had "something" to teach, some Samadhi or mind state. But attainment is the problem itself. We attain form and ignorance, we do not attain wisdom or truth because it is already there. There is nothing to do but undo the illusion.
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And while Cicero suggests that we exercise for example and suffer the hardship of physical ordeal we do it with some future pleasure in mind like not being ill. But this does not exclude the possibility that we do it just to be well, and that being well feels better than being ill, but the feeling is secondary. Indeed if people exercise just to feel good they may as well do drugs! We exercise because it is better is more ways than just feeling good.
So in all things Cicero strips life of "truth" and "reality" and replaces it with just "feelings." And yes feelings do exist and have a bearing on how we view things and what we do, they are not everything. Turning back to SRH we don't for instance believe in Cicero because it feels good!
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