VIDEO: Why Am I Never Satisfied?
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Posted by Mark Zimmerman Apr 15, 2007 |
VIDEO: Why Am I Never Satisfied? (04:37)
Perceiving Reality explains that the calculation consciously and subsciously operating our every move is "How do I receive the maximum amount of pleasure for the minimum amount of effort?" (It's described in the video as the "E=mc squared of the ego.")
Pleasure, the reception of pleasure, is worth the effort. Whether it's a pleasure we will achieve in the next moment, or whether it's a pleasure that awaits four years from now, say, at the end of my university degree, we always calculate the present suffering with regard to the future pleasure and determine our actions as worthwhile or not if the pleasure we will receive justifies the effort we invest.
Opposite pleasure is a need for it. We experience everything through a comparison of opposites; light compared to darkness, black compared to white, and pleasure compared to pain. Opposite pleasure is a lack of pleasure called "pain," and we experience pleasure on the meeting point between the need for it and its fulfillment. (There's a clever example of the need to eat a steak and what happens during the process of its consumption in the video.)
We cannot feel pleasure if we don't have a need to feel pleasure. In the above example, when we're hungry and we start eating the steak, we feel the most pleasure is in its first bite. Then as we continue to eat, the pleasure diminishes, since the need for the pleasure also diminishes. Once we are full, we no longer need to eat, and from this point, if we were to keep eating the steak, it wouldn't be experienced as pleasure, but as pain - from bloated, to sick, to...BLURGH!
Our egoistic desires limit our experience of pleasure. The reason our need for pleasure diminishes once the pleasure is received is because all of our inborn desires are egoistic in nature. Our egoistic, self-serving desires are built in such a way that they can never be satisfied.
We feel that a greater pleasure exists beyond our present experience of pleasure. It does! All we need is a need for it, and then we can feel it. This need has to be for unlimited, boundless and ever-expanding pleasure.
How do we acquire the need for never-ending pleasure? We cannot acquire it through ourselves. This need has to come from others. We have to start needing to fulfill others, and through fulfilling others' desires, feel a constantly increasing pleasure. We have to desire "to bestow" rather than "to receive."
The desire to bestow is a spiritual desire. One taste of it is greater than every transient, egoistic pleasure we feel in our lives. It is not just a small pleasure extracted from our egoistic needs, but one that takes pleasure in everything. There is both no limit to the desire to fulfill others, and there is thus no limit to the pleasure one can extract from such a need.