Book | Series 10: Pleasure and Pain

Description

The course teaches you about what pleasure and pain are: reactions that have been conditioned into us biologically and psychologically. Correct conditioning facilitates reactions that enable us to keep safe and be creative. Incorrect conditioning facilitates reactions that cause us harm.

INTRODUCTION

In this series, we explore pleasure and pain.

Pleasure and pain are facts of everyday life. They assist in guiding our behaviour by reacting to the present moment, and signalling whether something should be embraced or avoided.

Pleasure and pain have been fundamental in the security of man as he has evolved.

Examples:

• Our conditioning to pain has helped us avoid dangerous creatures.
• Our conditioning to pleasure has helped us find food.

Contrary to the many benefits, pleasure and pain have extended themselves into the psychological field and begun to distort reality in a way that threatens the security of man.

Examples:

• The pleasure found in belief has fragmented man and resulted in innumerable wars.

The restraint on pleasure held by religious ideologies has begun to fade and be replaced by a permissiveness in modern society. This has led many people to be afflicted by an irresistible pleasure they cannot control and, inevitably, watch themselves building their life around. The pursuit of pleasure appears to move society towards greater levels of superficiality and causes a gradual degeneration in the mind of man.

In this series we neither condemn nor condone pleasure. The intention of this series is to undertake an honest enquiry into pleasure and pain so as to understand their activities: where they go right, and where they have gone wrong.

The purpose of our enquiry is beyond a mere intellectual comprehension. Not only do we intend to understand pleasure and pain, but we intend to observe how that understanding effects our own behaviour.

• The purpose of our enquiry is to examine whether the understanding of pleasure changes the operation of pleasure within ourselves, and whether the understanding of pain changes the operation of pain within ourselves.

Can the very understanding of pleasure and pain bring order to their operation within ourselves?