“Seek pleasure… intelligently!”
The Ancient Vedic Hindus told the story of a magic wishing tree, called Kalpatura,[3] They taught their children that the universe is like Kalpatura, in that its branches reach into every human heart, and it grants all wishes found there - along with ALL the consequences of those wishes! By way of this metaphor, they taught their young to be careful what they wish for, and helped them avoid mistakes by sorting good from bad pleasures. Because the universe has a way of teaching us what we need to learn.
Naturally, as children will, most will shower the magic tree with requests. But as children learn, so do we all that with too much candy comes indigestion. And likewise, all desires come with an inexorable price, and those that bring bad consequences might not be worth their cost. The ancients understood that there is nothing wrong with wanting pleasure, but not all pleasures are good pleasures, at least not if they bring bad consequences. So a wise person will seek pleasure intelligently.
There is nothing wrong with following our interests and letting our desires guide us, for it is the natural function of pleasure to lead us to what is good, and of pain to help us avoid what is not. But seeing that that desires can have both good and bad consequences, an intelligent person will follow the good, and choose their wants with careful discretion.
And they would do this, not merely for others sake, but for their own first and foremost, since their own happiness and well being will depend on setting themselves up for good consequences. And yet this form of self-interest would surely have good consequences for others as well, for a focus on consequences would surely reveal how our personal choices reverberate throughout eternity. Just imagine how much harm could be prevented in a given life, and in all that is effected by that life, if only we were to learn when young to choose our wants wisely. As with many ancient cultures, the Vedic Hindus also made clear that there is nothing shameful in the pursuit of pleasure. Physical pleasure may be at the bottom rung of other higher pleasures one might choose, but this is understood as one of the four legitimate life goals that all humans must pursue and learn from. And so there is nothing wrong with starting at the beginning. “Quite the contrary; the thought of children without toys is sad. Even sadder, though, is the prospect of adults who remain fixated at their level.”(Smith, 20)
So to the hedonist, Hinduism would say, go for it – just use good sense and follow the moral law of nature, for our pleasures ought not to cause others or our selves pain. If it does, we will learn not to indulge such desires. So just as a child learns to enjoy ever more challenging toys over time, so each of us who learns will discover the delights of the senses. However, we will also learn that those “that seemed exhilarating when the experience was new may very well come to seem unfulfilling over time.(Smith, 49) And when they do, the wise will choose to advance upward through higher stages of pleasure toward understanding of ever higher goods.
So we progress as the learning soul considers its progress carefully so to advance toward perfection or spiritual excellence (that is, toward life, wisdom, and happiness) rather than away from it (toward death, ignorance, and misery). A soul just beginning its psychological journey will naturally follow a path of desire, which will begin with want of immediate pleasures. But ultimately, by way of this learning process, we come to see that it stands to reason that, “Small immediate goals must be sacrificed for long range gains, and impulses that would injure others must be curbed to avoid antagonisms and remorse. Only the stupid will lie, steal, cheat, or succumb to addictions. But as long as the basic rules of morality are observed, you are free to seek all the pleasure you want.”(Smith, 18)
And by way of this progressive learning, one will arrive next along the path of desire at want of accomplishment and worldly success, usually taking the form of wealth, fame, and glory. But “Wealth, fame, and power are exclusive, hence competitive, hence precarious….as other people want them too, who knows when fortune will change hands?”(Smith, 18) “Unlike mental and spiritual treasures,” these zero-sum (extrinsic) goods can easily be lost. What’s more, even when they can be maintained in abundance, these too will ultimately come to seem trivial and unfulfilling. Smith observes that, “To try to extinguish greed with money is like trying to quench fire by pouring butter over it.”(Smith, 19)
At this stage, those who do not perceive the path they are on may stall, and thus, psychological maturity often does not correspond with chronological age. It was this that moved the ancients to consider the possibility of past lives, because of the preponderance of wise children and old fools.
People are different, this much is true, and this is, in part, the result of past learning, or its lack. Still, while not everyone decides to advance in every life, everyone could who choose to learn. All the same, many may seem content with their material lot, sometimes for entire lifetimes, though having never experienced or even imagined higher goods, they really don’t know what they are missing. But they are often deeply aware that they are indeed missing something. “It is people who place these things first in their lives who cannot be satisfied, and for a discernable reason.”(Smith, 19) Sadly, it is often these who will pursue this futile process indefinitely, somehow expecting different results. But just as money is not an end in itself, but a means to other ends, so all excessive wants are ultimately unsatisfying, because “you can never get enough of what you don’t really want” to begin with.(Smith, 19)
All we really want are the ends to which these pleasures are only means, such as security, comfort, and freedom. But for those who do not recognize these ultimate purposes, the process can be unending. Indeed, “The parable of the driver who kept his donkey plodding by attaching a carrot to its harness comes from India.”(Smith, 19)
So the attentive spirit will come to see that all wants are mere means to other ends, all desires are paths to higher goals. These wants are, Smith explains, like apertures that let in a little light at a time, and it is by way of these windows that we come to see what is beyond our seeming wants, toward the higher and deeper goods that are what we actually and ultimately want. Or, if we resist what is shown us by way of our learning experience, our wants can also limit and blur our awareness, getting in the way of our potential vision of those more rewarding of life’s purposes.
In fact, as the advancing soul gradually learns, “Pleasure, success, and duty are not what we really want, [as]the Hindus say; what we really want is to be, to know, and to be happy.” Indeed, and somewhat surprisingly, what we really want is liberation (moksha) from want altogether! We want “liberation from everything that distances us from infinite joy, infinite awareness, and infinite being.”(Smith, 22) In fact, what we really want is “those things in infinite degree.”(Smith, 22)
So it is that by learning from ones experience of pleasure and worldly goods, a wise soul will advance on up the ladder of understanding, beyond the self-centered path of desire and toward an other-centered path that leads beyond those less fulfilling goods, which can be traps by which a spirit becomes tethered to dissatisfaction.
But again, not everyone will choose the path of maturity in this life, and some of them, not knowing what they’re missing, “will die with a sense of having had a good life.”(Smith, 21)
But for those who do advance in their spiritual understanding, the will to get will ultimately turn to the will to give, and the will to win turns into the will to serve.(Smith, 21) On this higher path of renunciation, the psychologically maturing spirit will come to seek the higher goods of respect and self-respect that come with friendship, community, love for and duty to others. What “it renounces [is] the ego’s claim to finality,”(Smith, 21) trading “a momentary pleasure for a more significant goal.”(Smith, 21)
But ultimately, even this duty will “leave the human spirit unfilled…Faithful performance of duty brings respect and gratitude from one’s peers. More important, however, is the self-respect that comes from doing’s one’s share. In the end, though, even these rewards prove insufficient.”(Smith, 21) Even these prove to be “a revolving door. Lean on it and it gives, [until] in time one discovers that it is going in circles.”(Smith, 49)
And so over time and with learning, one comes to understand that one already has what one has been seeking all along. And ultimately one comes to see that one might achieve in this way the ultimate and eternal goal – that is, liberation from all want and all desire, which is the very same thing as contentment and true satisfaction. When we find that we actually have within us what we wanted all along, i.e. to be, to know, and to feel love. And there and then, one finally becomes “in full what one always was at heart.”(Smith, 27)
So we can see why the Upanishads say:
“The good is one thing; the pleasant is another. These two, differing in their ends, both prompt to action. Both the good and the pleasant present themselves to men. The wise, having examined both, distinguish the one from the other. The wise prefer the good to the pleasant; the foolish, driven by [shallower] desires, prefer the pleasant to the good. Blessed are they that choose the good; they that choose the pleasant miss the goal.”(p.3)
This deep moral code guided the ancients, not merely to seek pleasure, but to “seek pleasure intelligently.” Remembering the magic wishing tree, Kalpatura, they were careful to live according to the inexorable “law of karma [that] renders the cosmos just.”
The ancient Hindus - like empathic parents - understood that we are always growing, always learning, hopefully for better rather than worse. We are born with attraction to pleasure and aversion from pain for good reason, because our survival depends on choosing wisely between them. But people being different from one another, at different stages in their learning process, and even different from themselves at different stages in their lives, also differ in their desires according to what they have learned about what is better and worse for them.
They understood and taught that want of various kinds of pleasure is perfectly understandable and even good for us, as long as we want what’s actually good for us, and are learning from the experience. So desire is not to be condemned across the board. But the human ego can become confused about what is good, and the more it wants of what isn’t in its better interests, the less satisfaction it actually achieves. And the reverse is also true: as Epicurus put it: the less we desire, the easier it is to experience satisfaction. And so a wise person will indeed seek pleasure, but will do so intelligently, so to learn in the process the difference between true pleasure and imposters.
Others insights can help guide us, but it is ultimately from our own experience that we come to see what’s worth trading for what. So enjoy those true and intrinsic goods that are widely available in human life…and learn their difference from seeming goods that ultimately bring more pain than pleasure. Good pleasures will have good consequences, whereas bad pleasures will make us regret them, in one way or another. Even if gods and men never know, as Socrates says, we will know…because one cannot run away from one’s own memory, wherein one’s self-knowledge resides. (This would be argument enough against the death penalty to convince me, btw. People who have created such memories for themselves ought to have to live in the hell on earth they’ve created inside their own being.)
Aristotle too argues this controversial point, concluding that, just as a ‘bad’ person’s suffering cannot be seen by others, a good person’s pleasure will be theirs alone to enjoy. Though outward signs of good character will abound, “The pleasure of a just man can never be felt by one who is not just.”[1]
We might rightly wonder who is to say what true happiness actually is? Who has a right to declare one kind of pleasure qualitatively better than pleasure in another sense? Aristotle would answer – it is the person who has experienced both. That is the point of view from which the difference can best be understood, known only by the empathy in memory in those who’ve learned better.
As you can see, the ancients held a view of human nature that is more generous than the typical western view – one that understands that all are always learning. They understood that we are born fundamentally good, though it may be difficult to maintain, and ultimately buried deep within us, beneath “an almost impenetrable mass of distractions, delusions, and self-serving instincts…[of] our surface selves.”(Smith, 22) But just as “a chimney can be covered with dust, dirt, and mud to the point where no light pierces it at all,” so “the human project is to clean one’s ‘chimney’ to allow the light within to radiate” outward.(Smith, 22)
It is by way of such metaphors that the ancient Hindu sages understood the nature and danger of misunderstanding human want in a way long lost in our modern world. And it could take us a long way toward helping one another and our young learn the difference in what we merely want, and what we truly need, and indeed, the difference in what we think is good, and is actually good for us. Indeed, much of our suffering, as Buddha would later teach, results from wanting what’s not good for us, and both getting and not getting what we want, as karma would have it.
And so we can see why Buddha, who was himself born a Hindu, went against the tenets of what Hinduism had become in teaching it to be possible to reach enlightenment in a single lifetime. Seeing what Hinduism had deteriorated into by his time, a strict caste system that benefit those at the top with great excess, and kept those at the bottom confined by custom to lives of service and slavery, often involving unending struggle and great suffering, All of which reinforced the belief that it took many lifetimes to achieve the ultimate enlightenment, By contrast, Buddha held to the inspired origins of the ancient, and thus taught “a religion devoid of authority,” encouraging all who followed him to “be lamps unto themselves,” and to “work out their own salvation with diligence.”[2] Buddha himself had been born into the highest caste, but he gave up his privilege for the sake of a more egalitarian spiritual search.
All the same, despite all his warnings about the dangers of social control and organized religion, this insight apparently lasted only as long as he was alive. For after his death, “all the accouterments that he had labored to protect his religion from came tumbling in,” as a priesthood that had been waiting in the wings swooped in to take over and organized his teachings into yet another institutionalized religion.[p.68] Perhaps this is why the ancients had only half-joked, “God created religion –then the devil came along and said, ‘Here, let me organize that for you.”
In recent times, Laurence Kohlberg (1963) illuminated this process in contemporary terms. He isolated six levels of moral development, and showed a parallel relationship between an understanding of justice and the level of one’s ability to be self-determined. Individuals at the lower five levels respond to and are motivated by (1) punishment, (2) extrinsic goods and rewards, (3) social disapproval, (4) authority, (5) community respect and disrespect. All of these involve extrinsic rewards and direction. Only the highest level involves, (6) an understanding of justice, where the person is responding to the dictates of the inner self, independent of the control of his social environment. Indeed, only when one is free enough of the control of others can one become truly responsible for himself enough to see justice as being in his or her best interest.
Gandhi summed this up in the concept of satyagraha – which means, he says, truth (satya) and firmness (agraha) -- “the force that is born of truth and love.” It is a term he used to explain his all encompassing conception of ‘passive resistance.’
“It is a force that works silently and apparently slowly. In reality, there is no force in the world that is so direct or so swift in working. Satyagraha is a force which, if it became universal, would revolutionize social ideals and do away with despotism and ever growing militarism under which the nations in the west are growing and being crushed to death… It is totally untrue to say that satyagraha is a force to be used only by the weak so long as they are not capable of meeting violence by violence…This force is to violence, and therefore to all tyranny, all injustice, what light is to darkness. It is desire to do the opponent good…. Even if the opponent plays him false twenty times, the satyagraha is ready to trust him the twenty-first time, for an implicit trust in human nature is the very essence of his creed... A satyagraha is nothing if not instinctively law abiding, and it is his law-abiding nature which exacts from him implicit obedience to the highest law, that is, the voice of conscience which overrides all other laws.”
Kohlberg’s levels are stages of a developmental in which growth depends on one’s ability to understand and spontaneously employ their higher developmental potentials. By this theory, not only do ‘great souls’ exist in this world, but there is potential in every life to achieve this level of moral greatness. Indeed, it is the degree to which a person is controlled by extrinsic rewards that determines the degree to which one is morally developed, for intrinsic rewards are enough for those who see their true worth.
Everyone is bound to learn eventually, ancient Hindus say, that what we really want is simply to be, to know, and to feel joy, which behooves us to avoid that which diminishes these. But again, not everyone will learn the true means to these ends in a single lifetime, or perhaps even many, for one must do the work to gain the insight.
And so we may advance by fits and starts as we zig-zag our way toward our higher potentials, sometimes even by way of some steps forward, and some steps back. Whereas the unwise will put lower and selfish pleasures before all else, they will find them impossible to satisfy, and perhaps even make themselves miserable in the process.
But if we are wise, we will want pleasure in proper proportion, and thus find such desires easy to satisfy.
So it is that the ancients teach their young that, rather than deny the value of lower or base pleasures, we ought to recognize that intrinsic wants are the means by which we grow to understand higher goods. So we ought to learn to want what is actually good for us. Again, there is nothing wrong with seeking pleasure, as long as we do so intelligently! That is, according to the rules of morality, the “moral law of cause and effect,” that commits us to “complete personal responsibility” in a “completely moral universe.”(Smith, 49)
And so, only by learning from of the consequences of our choices will we advance through the stages of desire and renunciation of what seems to be good for us, toward a higher understanding of what is truly good for us. Until we ultimately discover the truth of reality, as the song says -- “It’s not having what you want, but wanting what you have” that matters.
Here then one can finally see that the very condition of one’s inner world is the result of how one has lived. For this is where karma takes its direct and inexorable toll. “The present condition of each interior life – how happy it is, how confused or serene, how much it sees – is an exact product of what it has wanted and done in the past. Equally, one’s present thoughts and decisions determine one’s future experiences.”(Smith, 49)
“Each act that is directed upon the world reacts to oneself, delivering a chisel blow that sculpts one’s destiny.”(Smith, 49) And so our every choice feeds back on us, such that even how much one sees is a product of one’s karma; thus, one’s very intelligence or ignorance will be a manifestation of the rewards of one’s way of living. It is in this way that the ancients understood how it is that there are many paths to the same summit.
And perhaps only at this point does the human spirit notice that it was never alone in this journey, but has been traveling with a “constant companion, the Friend who understands,” that is “the god within.”(Smith, 50) Which perhaps explains why the Hindu sages proclaimed we should, “Leave all and follow the Self! Enjoy its inexpressible riches.”(Upanishads, Smith, 40)
However, our modern western habit of perceiving the objects of our knowledge from outside-looking-in inclines us to think of the self itself as an object, rather than as subject, from inside out. “Our word ‘personality’ comes from the Latin persona which originally referred to the mask an actor donned as he or she stepped onto the stage. The mask depicted the actor’s role, while behind it the actor remained hidden and anonymous.”(Smith, 27) Likewise, the “word ‘my’ always implies a distinction between the possessor and what is possessed.” So when I “speak of my body, my mind, and my personality, [this] suggests that in some sense I think of myself as distinct from them as well.”(Smith, 27)
And so a proper understanding of the self in eastern thought compels us to reconsider our ways of knowing, so to see the self in its highest form, as the ancients conceived it – not as something to be looked at, but as that which we see through. As the equally ancient Taoists put it, “not merely, ‘things perceived,’ but ‘that by which we perceive.’”(Tao Te Ching, Smith, p.131)
The “enduring Self” that the ancient understood to be the self-same with God, is not “the transient self” that comes to mind when we, in the west, consider our ‘self-interest’.(Smith, 27) We must “distinguish between the surface self that crowds the foreground of attention and the larger self that is latent and out of sight.”(Smith, 27)[3] For knowledge of this deeper self “is identical with being.”(Smith, 27)
As we’ve said, the earliest Christians also seem to have understood that “to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God: this is the secret of gnosis,” Elaine Pagels tells us. “Self–knowledge is knowledge of God; the self and the divine are identical.”(The Gnostic Gospels) And ‘The way to ascend onto God is to descend into one’s self’.”(Suzuki, p. 43)
And this is why Socrates made the case that :
“There should be no element of slavery in learning,” Socrates says. “Enforced exercise does no harm to the body but enforced learning will not stay in the mind. So avoid compulsion, and let your children's lessons take the form of play. This will also help you to see what they are naturally fitted for."[Plato’s Republic, p.258]
As the ancients learned from nature, “you’ll gain more produce by sowing and planting what the land readily grows and nurtures than by sowing and planting what you want.”(p.341)[4]
[1] (Nicomachean Ethics)
[2]
[3]
[4] (Xenophon 1990)
NOTES:
On Wants and Desires, Good and Bad Pleasures***:
According to early Hindus, what are the two paths we all follow, and what are the four basic things that people want, and why? How and why do we progress in each case from one level of want to the next? When they say we ultimately want liberation, what is it that we want liberation from? "
As long as the basic rules of morality are observed, you are free to seek all the pleasure you want." What are the basic rules of morality that must be observed? Why? What does it mean to "seek pleasure intelligently"? What is meant by the phrase "you can never really get enough of what you don't really want to begin with"?
As “Nanabozhoo has an enormous appetite for the sensual pleasures of life.”(OI, Nelon, 2)
As Socrates said, when people desire what’s actually good for them, then desire is part of human wisdom…different levels as we mature through a learning process…Hindu believed that…
But too often we follow the temptation of pleasures, without taking time to consider which are good pleasures, and which are not – that is, which will bring good consequences, and which will bring consequences we wish we didn’t have coming to us. Figuring out the difference in mere pleasure and true pleasure, or true good, is the first lesson the ancient taught their young. For what good is getting what we want, if what we wanted turns out not to be good for us? (*put pleasure/good quote)
The ancient Vedic Hindus taught their young that the universe is like the magic wishing tree, they called Kalpatura - It will give you everything you wish for, they told them, along with ALL of the consequences of those wants! Which means…
Wouldn’t it have made a difference if we too had learned when we were young to be careful what we wish for, because we not only will get it, but more than we bargained for! Wants and values become actions, and actions have consequences that we will live with, like it or not! So it’s in our best interest to wish instead for what IS really good for us, rather than the mere appearance of it. For if we choose badly, even when we get what we want, we will not be happy with it. And appearing happy is not the same thing as actually being happy. It’s the real thing that we truly want, even if we sometimes wish for the mere semblance, what that’s all we’ve learned to hope for. Aim higher! Because it stands to reason that we can’t hit a target we don’t aim at!
“There are appetites which are lawful, and follow the laws of nature and temperate reason,[RepJ BookIX 571] But instead of helping our young to want what’s good for them, we teach them, indeed condition them, to want all manner of things that will cost them a higher price than they know – and not because it’s good for them, but because it’s good for our economy. In effect, we’re sacrificing the well-being of our young as a mean to the well-being of institutions that were originally intended to serve the good of people. Go figure. And we’ve built an education system that serves as a mere means to other ends, such as material wealth, rather than to pursue inner wealth and happiness itself. Learning itself is happiness, not merely a means to money that, we are told, can buy us happiness. We are too often deliberately confused so that we cannot see when we’re being used.
Hence the reason that, while “everyone wants what’s good for them,” as Socrates says, “but not everyone knows what that is.” Like it or not, in the end (as many happy paupers and miserable tyrants indicates) we own our actions and their consequences. So why want what’s not actually good for us? Why not act with care and intelligence to figure out what that is?
For humility and sincerity bring harmony, the true meaning of delight, and humility and delight are complementary, like giving and receiving.
The Ancient Vedic Hindus told the story of a magic wishing tree, called Kalpatura,[3] They taught their children that the universe is like Kalpatura, in that its branches reach into every human heart, and it grants all wishes found there - along with ALL the consequences of those wishes! By way of this metaphor, they taught their young to be careful what they wish for, and helped them avoid mistakes by sorting good from bad pleasures. Because the universe has a way of teaching us what we need to learn.
Naturally, as children will, most will shower the magic tree with requests. But as children learn, so do we all that with too much candy comes indigestion. And likewise, all desires come with an inexorable price, and those that bring bad consequences might not be worth their cost. The ancients understood that there is nothing wrong with wanting pleasure, but not all pleasures are good pleasures, at least not if they bring bad consequences. So a wise person will seek pleasure intelligently.
There is nothing wrong with following our interests and letting our desires guide us, for it is the natural function of pleasure to lead us to what is good, and of pain to help us avoid what is not. But seeing that that desires can have both good and bad consequences, an intelligent person will follow the good, and choose their wants with careful discretion.
And they would do this, not merely for others sake, but for their own first and foremost, since their own happiness and well being will depend on setting themselves up for good consequences. And yet this form of self-interest would surely have good consequences for others as well, for a focus on consequences would surely reveal how our personal choices reverberate throughout eternity. Just imagine how much harm could be prevented in a given life, and in all that is effected by that life, if only we were to learn when young to choose our wants wisely. As with many ancient cultures, the Vedic Hindus also made clear that there is nothing shameful in the pursuit of pleasure. Physical pleasure may be at the bottom rung of other higher pleasures one might choose, but this is understood as one of the four legitimate life goals that all humans must pursue and learn from. And so there is nothing wrong with starting at the beginning. “Quite the contrary; the thought of children without toys is sad. Even sadder, though, is the prospect of adults who remain fixated at their level.”(Smith, 20)
So to the hedonist, Hinduism would say, go for it – just use good sense and follow the moral law of nature, for our pleasures ought not to cause others or our selves pain. If it does, we will learn not to indulge such desires. So just as a child learns to enjoy ever more challenging toys over time, so each of us who learns will discover the delights of the senses. However, we will also learn that those “that seemed exhilarating when the experience was new may very well come to seem unfulfilling over time.(Smith, 49) And when they do, the wise will choose to advance upward through higher stages of pleasure toward understanding of ever higher goods.
So we progress as the learning soul considers its progress carefully so to advance toward perfection or spiritual excellence (that is, toward life, wisdom, and happiness) rather than away from it (toward death, ignorance, and misery). A soul just beginning its psychological journey will naturally follow a path of desire, which will begin with want of immediate pleasures. But ultimately, by way of this learning process, we come to see that it stands to reason that, “Small immediate goals must be sacrificed for long range gains, and impulses that would injure others must be curbed to avoid antagonisms and remorse. Only the stupid will lie, steal, cheat, or succumb to addictions. But as long as the basic rules of morality are observed, you are free to seek all the pleasure you want.”(Smith, 18)
And by way of this progressive learning, one will arrive next along the path of desire at want of accomplishment and worldly success, usually taking the form of wealth, fame, and glory. But “Wealth, fame, and power are exclusive, hence competitive, hence precarious….as other people want them too, who knows when fortune will change hands?”(Smith, 18) “Unlike mental and spiritual treasures,” these zero-sum (extrinsic) goods can easily be lost. What’s more, even when they can be maintained in abundance, these too will ultimately come to seem trivial and unfulfilling. Smith observes that, “To try to extinguish greed with money is like trying to quench fire by pouring butter over it.”(Smith, 19)
At this stage, those who do not perceive the path they are on may stall, and thus, psychological maturity often does not correspond with chronological age. It was this that moved the ancients to consider the possibility of past lives, because of the preponderance of wise children and old fools.
People are different, this much is true, and this is, in part, the result of past learning, or its lack. Still, while not everyone decides to advance in every life, everyone could who choose to learn. All the same, many may seem content with their material lot, sometimes for entire lifetimes, though having never experienced or even imagined higher goods, they really don’t know what they are missing. But they are often deeply aware that they are indeed missing something. “It is people who place these things first in their lives who cannot be satisfied, and for a discernable reason.”(Smith, 19) Sadly, it is often these who will pursue this futile process indefinitely, somehow expecting different results. But just as money is not an end in itself, but a means to other ends, so all excessive wants are ultimately unsatisfying, because “you can never get enough of what you don’t really want” to begin with.(Smith, 19)
All we really want are the ends to which these pleasures are only means, such as security, comfort, and freedom. But for those who do not recognize these ultimate purposes, the process can be unending. Indeed, “The parable of the driver who kept his donkey plodding by attaching a carrot to its harness comes from India.”(Smith, 19)
So the attentive spirit will come to see that all wants are mere means to other ends, all desires are paths to higher goals. These wants are, Smith explains, like apertures that let in a little light at a time, and it is by way of these windows that we come to see what is beyond our seeming wants, toward the higher and deeper goods that are what we actually and ultimately want. Or, if we resist what is shown us by way of our learning experience, our wants can also limit and blur our awareness, getting in the way of our potential vision of those more rewarding of life’s purposes.
In fact, as the advancing soul gradually learns, “Pleasure, success, and duty are not what we really want, [as]the Hindus say; what we really want is to be, to know, and to be happy.” Indeed, and somewhat surprisingly, what we really want is liberation (moksha) from want altogether! We want “liberation from everything that distances us from infinite joy, infinite awareness, and infinite being.”(Smith, 22) In fact, what we really want is “those things in infinite degree.”(Smith, 22)
So it is that by learning from ones experience of pleasure and worldly goods, a wise soul will advance on up the ladder of understanding, beyond the self-centered path of desire and toward an other-centered path that leads beyond those less fulfilling goods, which can be traps by which a spirit becomes tethered to dissatisfaction.
But again, not everyone will choose the path of maturity in this life, and some of them, not knowing what they’re missing, “will die with a sense of having had a good life.”(Smith, 21)
But for those who do advance in their spiritual understanding, the will to get will ultimately turn to the will to give, and the will to win turns into the will to serve.(Smith, 21) On this higher path of renunciation, the psychologically maturing spirit will come to seek the higher goods of respect and self-respect that come with friendship, community, love for and duty to others. What “it renounces [is] the ego’s claim to finality,”(Smith, 21) trading “a momentary pleasure for a more significant goal.”(Smith, 21)
But ultimately, even this duty will “leave the human spirit unfilled…Faithful performance of duty brings respect and gratitude from one’s peers. More important, however, is the self-respect that comes from doing’s one’s share. In the end, though, even these rewards prove insufficient.”(Smith, 21) Even these prove to be “a revolving door. Lean on it and it gives, [until] in time one discovers that it is going in circles.”(Smith, 49)
And so over time and with learning, one comes to understand that one already has what one has been seeking all along. And ultimately one comes to see that one might achieve in this way the ultimate and eternal goal – that is, liberation from all want and all desire, which is the very same thing as contentment and true satisfaction. When we find that we actually have within us what we wanted all along, i.e. to be, to know, and to feel love. And there and then, one finally becomes “in full what one always was at heart.”(Smith, 27)
So we can see why the Upanishads say:
“The good is one thing; the pleasant is another. These two, differing in their ends, both prompt to action. Both the good and the pleasant present themselves to men. The wise, having examined both, distinguish the one from the other. The wise prefer the good to the pleasant; the foolish, driven by [shallower] desires, prefer the pleasant to the good. Blessed are they that choose the good; they that choose the pleasant miss the goal.”(p.3)
This deep moral code guided the ancients, not merely to seek pleasure, but to “seek pleasure intelligently.” Remembering the magic wishing tree, Kalpatura, they were careful to live according to the inexorable “law of karma [that] renders the cosmos just.”
The ancient Hindus - like empathic parents - understood that we are always growing, always learning, hopefully for better rather than worse. We are born with attraction to pleasure and aversion from pain for good reason, because our survival depends on choosing wisely between them. But people being different from one another, at different stages in their learning process, and even different from themselves at different stages in their lives, also differ in their desires according to what they have learned about what is better and worse for them.
They understood and taught that want of various kinds of pleasure is perfectly understandable and even good for us, as long as we want what’s actually good for us, and are learning from the experience. So desire is not to be condemned across the board. But the human ego can become confused about what is good, and the more it wants of what isn’t in its better interests, the less satisfaction it actually achieves. And the reverse is also true: as Epicurus put it: the less we desire, the easier it is to experience satisfaction. And so a wise person will indeed seek pleasure, but will do so intelligently, so to learn in the process the difference between true pleasure and imposters.
Others insights can help guide us, but it is ultimately from our own experience that we come to see what’s worth trading for what. So enjoy those true and intrinsic goods that are widely available in human life…and learn their difference from seeming goods that ultimately bring more pain than pleasure. Good pleasures will have good consequences, whereas bad pleasures will make us regret them, in one way or another. Even if gods and men never know, as Socrates says, we will know…because one cannot run away from one’s own memory, wherein one’s self-knowledge resides. (This would be argument enough against the death penalty to convince me, btw. People who have created such memories for themselves ought to have to live in the hell on earth they’ve created inside their own being.)
Aristotle too argues this controversial point, concluding that, just as a ‘bad’ person’s suffering cannot be seen by others, a good person’s pleasure will be theirs alone to enjoy. Though outward signs of good character will abound, “The pleasure of a just man can never be felt by one who is not just.”[1]
We might rightly wonder who is to say what true happiness actually is? Who has a right to declare one kind of pleasure qualitatively better than pleasure in another sense? Aristotle would answer – it is the person who has experienced both. That is the point of view from which the difference can best be understood, known only by the empathy in memory in those who’ve learned better.
As you can see, the ancients held a view of human nature that is more generous than the typical western view – one that understands that all are always learning. They understood that we are born fundamentally good, though it may be difficult to maintain, and ultimately buried deep within us, beneath “an almost impenetrable mass of distractions, delusions, and self-serving instincts…[of] our surface selves.”(Smith, 22) But just as “a chimney can be covered with dust, dirt, and mud to the point where no light pierces it at all,” so “the human project is to clean one’s ‘chimney’ to allow the light within to radiate” outward.(Smith, 22)
It is by way of such metaphors that the ancient Hindu sages understood the nature and danger of misunderstanding human want in a way long lost in our modern world. And it could take us a long way toward helping one another and our young learn the difference in what we merely want, and what we truly need, and indeed, the difference in what we think is good, and is actually good for us. Indeed, much of our suffering, as Buddha would later teach, results from wanting what’s not good for us, and both getting and not getting what we want, as karma would have it.
And so we can see why Buddha, who was himself born a Hindu, went against the tenets of what Hinduism had become in teaching it to be possible to reach enlightenment in a single lifetime. Seeing what Hinduism had deteriorated into by his time, a strict caste system that benefit those at the top with great excess, and kept those at the bottom confined by custom to lives of service and slavery, often involving unending struggle and great suffering, All of which reinforced the belief that it took many lifetimes to achieve the ultimate enlightenment, By contrast, Buddha held to the inspired origins of the ancient, and thus taught “a religion devoid of authority,” encouraging all who followed him to “be lamps unto themselves,” and to “work out their own salvation with diligence.”[2] Buddha himself had been born into the highest caste, but he gave up his privilege for the sake of a more egalitarian spiritual search.
All the same, despite all his warnings about the dangers of social control and organized religion, this insight apparently lasted only as long as he was alive. For after his death, “all the accouterments that he had labored to protect his religion from came tumbling in,” as a priesthood that had been waiting in the wings swooped in to take over and organized his teachings into yet another institutionalized religion.[p.68] Perhaps this is why the ancients had only half-joked, “God created religion –then the devil came along and said, ‘Here, let me organize that for you.”
In recent times, Laurence Kohlberg (1963) illuminated this process in contemporary terms. He isolated six levels of moral development, and showed a parallel relationship between an understanding of justice and the level of one’s ability to be self-determined. Individuals at the lower five levels respond to and are motivated by (1) punishment, (2) extrinsic goods and rewards, (3) social disapproval, (4) authority, (5) community respect and disrespect. All of these involve extrinsic rewards and direction. Only the highest level involves, (6) an understanding of justice, where the person is responding to the dictates of the inner self, independent of the control of his social environment. Indeed, only when one is free enough of the control of others can one become truly responsible for himself enough to see justice as being in his or her best interest.
Gandhi summed this up in the concept of satyagraha – which means, he says, truth (satya) and firmness (agraha) -- “the force that is born of truth and love.” It is a term he used to explain his all encompassing conception of ‘passive resistance.’
“It is a force that works silently and apparently slowly. In reality, there is no force in the world that is so direct or so swift in working. Satyagraha is a force which, if it became universal, would revolutionize social ideals and do away with despotism and ever growing militarism under which the nations in the west are growing and being crushed to death… It is totally untrue to say that satyagraha is a force to be used only by the weak so long as they are not capable of meeting violence by violence…This force is to violence, and therefore to all tyranny, all injustice, what light is to darkness. It is desire to do the opponent good…. Even if the opponent plays him false twenty times, the satyagraha is ready to trust him the twenty-first time, for an implicit trust in human nature is the very essence of his creed... A satyagraha is nothing if not instinctively law abiding, and it is his law-abiding nature which exacts from him implicit obedience to the highest law, that is, the voice of conscience which overrides all other laws.”
Kohlberg’s levels are stages of a developmental in which growth depends on one’s ability to understand and spontaneously employ their higher developmental potentials. By this theory, not only do ‘great souls’ exist in this world, but there is potential in every life to achieve this level of moral greatness. Indeed, it is the degree to which a person is controlled by extrinsic rewards that determines the degree to which one is morally developed, for intrinsic rewards are enough for those who see their true worth.
Everyone is bound to learn eventually, ancient Hindus say, that what we really want is simply to be, to know, and to feel joy, which behooves us to avoid that which diminishes these. But again, not everyone will learn the true means to these ends in a single lifetime, or perhaps even many, for one must do the work to gain the insight.
And so we may advance by fits and starts as we zig-zag our way toward our higher potentials, sometimes even by way of some steps forward, and some steps back. Whereas the unwise will put lower and selfish pleasures before all else, they will find them impossible to satisfy, and perhaps even make themselves miserable in the process.
But if we are wise, we will want pleasure in proper proportion, and thus find such desires easy to satisfy.
So it is that the ancients teach their young that, rather than deny the value of lower or base pleasures, we ought to recognize that intrinsic wants are the means by which we grow to understand higher goods. So we ought to learn to want what is actually good for us. Again, there is nothing wrong with seeking pleasure, as long as we do so intelligently! That is, according to the rules of morality, the “moral law of cause and effect,” that commits us to “complete personal responsibility” in a “completely moral universe.”(Smith, 49)
And so, only by learning from of the consequences of our choices will we advance through the stages of desire and renunciation of what seems to be good for us, toward a higher understanding of what is truly good for us. Until we ultimately discover the truth of reality, as the song says -- “It’s not having what you want, but wanting what you have” that matters.
Here then one can finally see that the very condition of one’s inner world is the result of how one has lived. For this is where karma takes its direct and inexorable toll. “The present condition of each interior life – how happy it is, how confused or serene, how much it sees – is an exact product of what it has wanted and done in the past. Equally, one’s present thoughts and decisions determine one’s future experiences.”(Smith, 49)
“Each act that is directed upon the world reacts to oneself, delivering a chisel blow that sculpts one’s destiny.”(Smith, 49) And so our every choice feeds back on us, such that even how much one sees is a product of one’s karma; thus, one’s very intelligence or ignorance will be a manifestation of the rewards of one’s way of living. It is in this way that the ancients understood how it is that there are many paths to the same summit.
And perhaps only at this point does the human spirit notice that it was never alone in this journey, but has been traveling with a “constant companion, the Friend who understands,” that is “the god within.”(Smith, 50) Which perhaps explains why the Hindu sages proclaimed we should, “Leave all and follow the Self! Enjoy its inexpressible riches.”(Upanishads, Smith, 40)
However, our modern western habit of perceiving the objects of our knowledge from outside-looking-in inclines us to think of the self itself as an object, rather than as subject, from inside out. “Our word ‘personality’ comes from the Latin persona which originally referred to the mask an actor donned as he or she stepped onto the stage. The mask depicted the actor’s role, while behind it the actor remained hidden and anonymous.”(Smith, 27) Likewise, the “word ‘my’ always implies a distinction between the possessor and what is possessed.” So when I “speak of my body, my mind, and my personality, [this] suggests that in some sense I think of myself as distinct from them as well.”(Smith, 27)
And so a proper understanding of the self in eastern thought compels us to reconsider our ways of knowing, so to see the self in its highest form, as the ancients conceived it – not as something to be looked at, but as that which we see through. As the equally ancient Taoists put it, “not merely, ‘things perceived,’ but ‘that by which we perceive.’”(Tao Te Ching, Smith, p.131)
The “enduring Self” that the ancient understood to be the self-same with God, is not “the transient self” that comes to mind when we, in the west, consider our ‘self-interest’.(Smith, 27) We must “distinguish between the surface self that crowds the foreground of attention and the larger self that is latent and out of sight.”(Smith, 27)[3] For knowledge of this deeper self “is identical with being.”(Smith, 27)
As we’ve said, the earliest Christians also seem to have understood that “to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God: this is the secret of gnosis,” Elaine Pagels tells us. “Self–knowledge is knowledge of God; the self and the divine are identical.”(The Gnostic Gospels) And ‘The way to ascend onto God is to descend into one’s self’.”(Suzuki, p. 43)
And this is why Socrates made the case that :
“There should be no element of slavery in learning,” Socrates says. “Enforced exercise does no harm to the body but enforced learning will not stay in the mind. So avoid compulsion, and let your children's lessons take the form of play. This will also help you to see what they are naturally fitted for."[Plato’s Republic, p.258]
As the ancients learned from nature, “you’ll gain more produce by sowing and planting what the land readily grows and nurtures than by sowing and planting what you want.”(p.341)[4]
[1] (Nicomachean Ethics)
[2]
[3]
[4] (Xenophon 1990)
NOTES:
On Wants and Desires, Good and Bad Pleasures***:
According to early Hindus, what are the two paths we all follow, and what are the four basic things that people want, and why? How and why do we progress in each case from one level of want to the next? When they say we ultimately want liberation, what is it that we want liberation from? "
As long as the basic rules of morality are observed, you are free to seek all the pleasure you want." What are the basic rules of morality that must be observed? Why? What does it mean to "seek pleasure intelligently"? What is meant by the phrase "you can never really get enough of what you don't really want to begin with"?
As “Nanabozhoo has an enormous appetite for the sensual pleasures of life.”(OI, Nelon, 2)
As Socrates said, when people desire what’s actually good for them, then desire is part of human wisdom…different levels as we mature through a learning process…Hindu believed that…
But too often we follow the temptation of pleasures, without taking time to consider which are good pleasures, and which are not – that is, which will bring good consequences, and which will bring consequences we wish we didn’t have coming to us. Figuring out the difference in mere pleasure and true pleasure, or true good, is the first lesson the ancient taught their young. For what good is getting what we want, if what we wanted turns out not to be good for us? (*put pleasure/good quote)
The ancient Vedic Hindus taught their young that the universe is like the magic wishing tree, they called Kalpatura - It will give you everything you wish for, they told them, along with ALL of the consequences of those wants! Which means…
Wouldn’t it have made a difference if we too had learned when we were young to be careful what we wish for, because we not only will get it, but more than we bargained for! Wants and values become actions, and actions have consequences that we will live with, like it or not! So it’s in our best interest to wish instead for what IS really good for us, rather than the mere appearance of it. For if we choose badly, even when we get what we want, we will not be happy with it. And appearing happy is not the same thing as actually being happy. It’s the real thing that we truly want, even if we sometimes wish for the mere semblance, what that’s all we’ve learned to hope for. Aim higher! Because it stands to reason that we can’t hit a target we don’t aim at!
“There are appetites which are lawful, and follow the laws of nature and temperate reason,[RepJ BookIX 571] But instead of helping our young to want what’s good for them, we teach them, indeed condition them, to want all manner of things that will cost them a higher price than they know – and not because it’s good for them, but because it’s good for our economy. In effect, we’re sacrificing the well-being of our young as a mean to the well-being of institutions that were originally intended to serve the good of people. Go figure. And we’ve built an education system that serves as a mere means to other ends, such as material wealth, rather than to pursue inner wealth and happiness itself. Learning itself is happiness, not merely a means to money that, we are told, can buy us happiness. We are too often deliberately confused so that we cannot see when we’re being used.
Hence the reason that, while “everyone wants what’s good for them,” as Socrates says, “but not everyone knows what that is.” Like it or not, in the end (as many happy paupers and miserable tyrants indicates) we own our actions and their consequences. So why want what’s not actually good for us? Why not act with care and intelligence to figure out what that is?
For humility and sincerity bring harmony, the true meaning of delight, and humility and delight are complementary, like giving and receiving.