Pleasure and Pain – Pleasure also causes pain

• These are your two ways of being here in the world: you are attracted towards something which you feel causes pleasure, you feel repelled, repulsed by something which you think causes pain. But if you become more and more alert, you will have a total mutation. You will be able to see that whatsoever causes pleasure also causes pain — pleasure in the beginning, pain in the end. Whatsoever causes pain also causes pleasure — pain in the beginning, pleasure in the end. These are the two ways in the world.

• One is the way of the householder. Try to understand it — it is very, very significant. One is the way of the householder, the grahstha. He lives through attachment, attraction. Whatsoever he feels will cause pleasure. he moves towards it. He clings to it and finally he finds pain and nothing else, anguish and nothing else.

• Just the opposite is the way of the monk, one who has renounced the world. He does not cling to pleasure. On the contrary, he starts clinging to pain, austerities, torture. He lies down on a bed of thorns, goes on a long fast, stands for years, does not sleep for months. He does just the opposite because he has come to know that whenever there is pleasure in the beginning, in the end there is pain. He has reversed the logic; now he seeks the pain. And he is right — if you seek pain there will be pleasure in the end.

• But a man who practices pain becomes incapable of feeling pain. A man who practices pain becomes incapable of pleasure for small things, just small things. You cannot understand. For a man who has been fasting for a month, ordinary bread and butter and salt is such a great feast. A man who has been lying down on thorns, if you allow him to lie down just on the ground, on the plain ground, no emperor could sleep so beautifully.

• But both are two aspects of the same coin, and both are wrong. The monk has just reversed the process: he is standing in a shirshasan, a head stand, but he is the same man. Both are attached: one is attached to pleasure, the other is attached to pain.

• A man of awareness is unattached. He is neither a grahstha, a householder, neither is he a monk. He does not move to the monastery and he does not go to the mountains. He remains wherever he is — he simply moves ‘withinwards’. On the out side there is no choice for him. He does not cling to pleasure and he does not cling to pain. He is neither a hedonist nor a self torturer. He simply moves ‘withinwards’ looking at the game of pleasure and pain, light and shadow, day and night, life and death. He moves beyond both. Because there is duality, he moves beyond both, he transcends both. He simply becomes alert and aware, and in that awareness for the first time some thing happens which is neither pain nor pleasure, but which is bliss. Bliss is not pleasure; pleasure is always mixed with pain. Bliss is neither pain nor pleasure, bliss is beyond both.

• And beyond both you are. That’s your nature, your purity, your crystal purity of being — just a transcendence. You live in the world but the world is not in you. You move in the world but the world doesn’t move in you. You remain untouched wherever you are. You become a lotus flower.