I came back from a quick vacation to Palm Springs to find that there was a bombing near where I stayed. Whew! Never a dull day. Anyway, during vacation I’ve had ample amount of time to meditate and meditate and meditate. We ate good food, relaxed in and out of water, and scrolled on our sides of the bed.
During the scroll I came across this video about rope tying. Now, I’m not an outdoor enthusiast but since I tried rock climbing I got interested in the art of tying ropes. It’s so cool! Knots! Suspension! You can make fences out of it! Or use it to reinforce other craft stuff! So I continued watching the reel to find… That it was rope tying for shibari.
Shibari is the Japanese word for bondage. It was this really well-produced reel for an Instagram account dedicated to educating people around bondage. Now, I’m sure this is a practice that comes with a lot of range of experiences so I understand the importance of such an account to help beginners of the art get introduced to it. But as I watched the different videos, what I picked up was that this was a very elaborate way of attaining a specific form of pleasure.
That’s the characteristic of pleasure, it keeps on having you thirst for more and more. It then has you disappointed when it cannot be gotten, and it has you excited when you get it! Only to get you used to that feeling to leave you thirsty for more. This repeats ad infinitum.
If I get a big pleasure out of being tied a certain way or tying my partner up a certain way, I’m sure it feels fucking amazing because it’s such a specific way of arriving at that pleasure. I somewhat understand this although it’s not sexual: it’s exactly how I approached music listening.
I used to be a big data hoarder, navigating the internet’s vast array of pirate sites to get the highest fidelity recordings of music. I would invest what little money I had on equipment and spend so many of my days completely consumed in the music. While I was happy listening to some great bootleg Radiohead concerts in my room with a can of beer in my hand, this meant I couldn’t listen to such great music on the go. So I would need to invest in great earphones.
Then I would occasionally go back to Korea and it would be great because I’m seeing the family but at the same time horrible because I don’t have access to my music. My music also happened to be only accessible through this niche software and that meant I needed to carry my entire setup around if I wanted to keep this kind of music listening habit on the go. Again, while I was experiencing music in my setup everything was absolutely fucking fantastic; but it came at the cost of other music seeming so bland.
What’s even worse was, listening to great albums on mediocre environments. Sometimes a shopping mall would play a great song through the store PA and it would completely ruin and butcher the great song. It would kill me on the inside while other people were just having a normal day.
So the pursuit of pleasure is a double edged sword, or expressed in another way pleasure and suffering are two sides of the same coin. You can’t have the pursuit of pleasure without suffering. And the more intricate steps you build in your pursuit of pleasure of course the payoff will be great, but so will the cost of dissatisfaction AND the future cost of building even more intricate steps to reach an even better pleasure.
In a bigger lens, the pursuit of pleasure can also be a way of exerting control over the world. We want to control how we are to be pleasured. So the more of these controls we have in place, the more we can purify the pleasures we get from the world instead of the randomness that comes from uncontrolled experiences.
Unfortunately we can’t really control anything outside of ourselves. I can be the biggest control freak and try and control my wife or my dogs or my clients, but that ironically puts me at their mercy. If they don’t listen to me, then I’m going to have a bad day. I can only have a good day when my exerted controls are working as intended.
To increase my chances I can be more manipulative or aggressive with my demands for control. This works for the short term but history has shown over and over control through oppression is only temporary (although the span of what “temporary” may differ). It’s obvious that wanting to control the world for my pleasure is a losing gambit. Then why do we keep engaging in this kind of behavior?
With any kind of pattern of behavior that is externally providing negative results, there’s a hidden internal positive result. That’s why people who drink tend to drink despite the health complications. That’s why smokers continue smoking even after puncturing a hole in their trachea to breathe. It gives them an internal satisfaction that no other stimulus can.
With controlling desires we tend to accrue disappointing results. This makes it seem like that controlling tendency is not doing its job. But it’s actually doing a surprisingly great job at it in the most unexpected way. When we try to control the world, we have controlover our disappointment.
By playing a losing game, we guarantee that we are going to have a good time. We can dictate when we are going to be disappointed. Controlling tendencies work not because of its success in controlling pleasure; but because of its overwhelming odds of success in controlling disappointment.
The key to understanding controlling tendencies, following this logic, is understanding why this need to have an on-demand pressable button is so important to our life. Have we been on the other end of a violent and powerful effect of another person before? Have we glorified the benefits of wielding such a power from our perceived lack? Are we such great powers in the world and is it that we are just asking the world for what we deserve?
Even with its success, control will ultimately give you happiness mixed in with suffering. This kind of happiness, we Buddhists call “dependent happiness”. True happiness doesn’t depend on anything and never comes with a sprinkle of suffering on top. And the nice (or bad, depending on your perspective) part about true independent happiness is… You don’t need to understand everything about your past life to change it. You just have to live the life of true happiness.
Will you start living a life of true happiness, or do you need to verify that at the end of your current pursuit there will be an everlasting true happiness?