Greetings to all my friends who have gathered together to obtain nourishment and truth, in whatever way they need it at the moment. This lecture deals with the topic of pleasure -- the meaning and the significance of pleasure in the scheme of the universe, as well as in the life of the individual human being.
Religion speaks of the ultimate bliss of being. Most of the time, however, this is completely misunderstood. The bliss of being is believed to be a state that is totally different from the human state of, or the potential for, ultimate pleasure. Therefore, bliss seems very remote from the human experience. It appears to be something disembodied and realizable only eons later. Because this kind of bliss appears so unreal to man, and so unrelated to what he considers truly desirable, it remains a vague theory at best.
In reality there is essentially no difference between the ultimate, spiritual state of bliss and the human potential for it. Only the degree of intensity varies. Although no human being is capable of the depth
of experience which is possible for an unstructured, highly developed consciousness, pleasure remains pleasure. Spiritual pleasure is not bodiless. Even an unstructured consciousness is not formless. It creates the subtle bodies, which consist of streaming energy in the purest form. This energy form is without obstruction. It is pleasure itself. The gross matter of the human body represents an obstruction that can be overcome only when the total personality attains harmony with the energy streamings of cosmic origin.
A very liberated human being, one with few blocks or inhibitions, without distortions or negativity, is capable of a high degree of pleasure, for then the energy of the subtle bodies penetrates the surface body. The conflict between the longing for pleasure and the fear of pleasure is one of man's most basic inner struggles.
Now we shall discuss the legitimate need for pleasure and its purpose for the human entity. I will show you that this need is not only not in opposition to true spiritual self-realization, as many people falsely believe, but is in fact one of its prerequisites. To put it differently, a person who blocks pleasure must, perforce, also block the deep connection with his spiritual self. Conversely, only a person who is free enough to let go in one respect
is free to do so in the other. Thus the apparently dualistic experiences of spiritual self-realization and the capacity for pleasure become one and the same. They are interactive and interdependent.
We shall also talk about the obstructions that barricade you from the
deep experience of pleasure supreme. What are these obstructions? In other words, what are the hindrances to the realization of that state which will always be the goal of your greatest longing, whether or not you are aware
of it? At the same time that you long for this pleasure, you obstruct this longing in your own soul. Therefore, you in a state of war within yourself.
I do not wish to dwell too long on the cosmic meaning of pleasure, for this always runs into the danger of making it appear too remote from your life right now. In reality this pleasure is not remote at all, for all cosmic reality applies to any state in the now. But it is easy to misread, and therefore to misapply, this truth. Only when a person reaches the point of being able to open the inner flow, to remove all inner obstructions and blocks, so that a high degree of bliss is experienced, will he inwardly know that human pleasure is essentially the same as the cosmic state of bliss. In other words, that spiritual bliss and physical pleasure are not opposites, but one and the same. Real pleasure is intensely fleshly and intensely spiritual. As
a matter of fact, there is no division between the fleshly state of man and
the spiritual state of man. This is why there is no need to dwell on the philosophical aspects of pleasure in the scheme of creation. The only thing I would like to mention in this regard is that the ultimate state of liberation, of cosmic being, is total pleasure. The ultimate reality is pleasure. It is not a reward for having been good, as religion, in its misinterpretation, seems to imply. Bliss is the natural state of a unified being who is in harmony with himself and with the universe.
When we speak of pleasure, then we must be clear about what we mean. I do not mean pleasurable pastimes of the mind. I do not mean shallow substitutes and escapes. I mean a state of physical and spiritual bliss that is experienced in every particle of one's body and of one's soul -- of the outer being and the inner being -- with all sensations and faculties alive, awake, and feeling. This state is very much a present reality. Yet this state is also the ultimate spiritual reality of every entity. It is your birthright, my friends. Therefore, your longing for it is the most real and the most healthy striving within yourself. It is only your confusions and dualistic splits that create the misconceptions, the fears, and the shames about pleasure that are so unnecessary.
Let us now come to the meaning of pleasure for the human being on
all levels of his existence. The pleasure we speak of here is a total experience, not a divided experience. In other words, it is not a physical experience that excludes the spiritual self. Nor is it a spiritual experience that excludes the physical self. Pleasure is a state in which your entire being vibrates and pulsates undividedly, in harmony with itself and the universe, and hence with another human being. There is no division within you, there is no no-current, there is no doubt about the rightfulness of your bliss. There are no ifs and buts, there is no fear that your bliss is interfering with the world around you. You feel no guilt, and therefore you have no hesitation. On the contrary, you will know inwardly the truth about your fulfillment, namely that the greater your ecstasy, your pleasure, and your joy, the more do you contribute to the world. When you reach this inner awareness -- not a theoretical awareness but an experiential awareness --
then you will create the following conditions within yourself: you will make the total experience of pleasure both a spiritual goal and a practical goal. You will act unceasingly on behalf of this goal. You will remove all your inner obstructions and you will patiently explore your unconscious in order to bring your obstructions to light. You will devote time and effort to this venture. You will increasingly feel that your personal fulfillment and your pleasure further your spiritual growth and your self-realization, and vice versa. The capacity to live intimately and completely with your body, with your soul, and with your spirit will be the goal that will develop simultaneously with your self-purification, for one cannot exist without the other.
Now let us discuss what full pleasure means on all levels of the human personality. On the physical level, physical health and physical well-being are totally regulated by and dependent on the degree of pleasure that a human body is capable of allowing. Since the streamings of pleasure are also the force of life, the force of health, the force of self-renewal, and the force of regeneration, then your health and your longevity are the results of
your capacity for pleasure. Conversely, to the degree that you deny yourself pleasure -- because of your shame, of your fear, of your misconceptions, and of your negativities -- to that degree you cut off your body from the wellspring of the universal flow.
Each human entity is a universe within himself or herself.
He is a microcosm representing the macroscopic universe. The same laws and the same conditions apply to the human entity as to the universe. Thus, if your inner universe is in harmony with itself, then the universal flow of spiritual healing, of power, of life, of health, and of pleasure that permeates the entire creation also permeates you. You become part of the universe and the universe becomes part of you. You transcend your structural limitations, even while you are still within your body. The unlimited universal abundance of ever self-renewing life will become a part of you; relatively while you are still in your body, completely only when your body self is transcended. But though your body will be transcended and will cease to exist, it is not true that the feelings that you experience in an unblocked body and soul condition while in the body will also cease to exist. This is an error. The opposite is true. The body feelings come from the subtle bodies. Therefore, they manifest only when the body blocks are removed. Thus, when bodily existence is transcended, then those identical feelings will manifest much more strongly because they will not be blocked by the gross matter of physical existence. It is important to understand that the feelings of pleasure and bliss which you register in your body will not
cease to exist in an existence beyond the earth life. They will be intensified. You will be more capable of sustaining the feeling of pleasure supreme, the feeling of ecstasy, the feeling of bliss, the feeling of love,
and the feeling of what is called sexuality on this earth sphere -- total fusion with another being. (I am speaking here of those entities who have put false fears and obstructions behind them; for entities who have not, then their spiritual existence will not be different from their earthly one.)
Any kind of physical illness or any kind of deterioration -- including physical death -- is a manifestation of division, of conflict, and of the denial of pleasure. It is therefore correct to say that spiritual unfoldment must bring an increase of pleasure -- and not, as many authoritarian religions maintain, a denial and a sacrifice of pleasure. The concept of martyrdom is a total misunderstanding of spiritual truth. But this truth, as I state it here, can be understood only when pleasure is no longer negative. In other words, when it is no longer at the expense of another human being, when it no longer carries destructive currents. Anyone can confirm the truth that the degree of deeply-experienced pleasure determines the degree of energy and the degree of well-being. This is not something that you have to take at face value. You can experience it yourself.
Now let us go to a deeper level in discussing the importance of pleasure. Pleasure is at least as important from the psychological point of view as from the point of view of physical well-being. But the process of developing the psychological attitudes and of making the choices that ultimately lead to pleasure may seem unclear or difficult at first. How can you shoulder mature self-responsibility? How can you accept the difficulties of the temporary reality which surrounds you and which is, in effect, the expression of your present inner state? How can you be asked to deal with and cope with the frustrations that come your way? Of course they come your way, in the last analysis, because of your inner limitations, but nevertheless you have to accept those limitations, and that is not easy.
How can you really want to give up the various ways in which you violate and impair your integrity? The way in which you secretly want to cheat life, the way in which you want others to carry the burden of responsibility for your mistakes? How can you truly commit yourself to integrity, to truth, to the deepest honesty, to a positive approach to yourself, and to a positive approach to life? How can you wish to abandon your negative pleasure?
In other words, the false satisfaction of your pretenses, of your role playing, of your defenses? How can you begin to, wholly and consciously, commit yourself to the reality of living, not for the sake of appearance, but for the sake of what is?
The answer is that you cannot do any of these things if you are not aware of the fact that the deepest bliss is awaiting you exactly as a result
of abandoning these false satisfactions and these false pleasures, these poor substitutes. As long as you are convinced that these substitutes offer all the pleasure there is in life and that decent living implies sacrifice for its own sake, then you cannot even believe in pleasure. This difficulty is intensified by the fact that pleasure is unbearable to the degree that you cling to all these false ways of life. You become capable of admitting real pleasure only to the degree that you are able to give up false or negative pleasure.
Therefore, you must find a way to break through the vicious circle
in which you are caught. The less you truly want to give up all these subtle falsities, these subterfuges, and these destructive defenses, the less you can accept pleasure. It follows then that you cannot want to give up that which keeps you from experiencing it. Thus, there exists no real will or commitment either to pleasure or to giving up the destructive, life-inhibiting patterns of feelings, of attitudes, and of actions that prevent your pleasure. This is the vicious circle.
Accepting reality and accepting mature self-responsibility seem
like a hardship if the realization of pleasure is not a simultaneous byproduct. So we can say with absolute accuracy: to the degree that
you insist on being an irresponsible child who wants to make others pay for your actions, or for the lack of them; to the degree that you secretly want
to neurotically cheat life -- in other words, to the degree that you impair your integrity in all these ways -- to that degree you cannot experience pleasure. Your innermost being does not make it possible. Your energy is engaged in those negative inner activities. But it is equally true to say that to the degree that you assume full self-responsibility, to the degree that you respect and love yourself because you inwardly no longer cheat in the subtlest of ways, to that degree you become more and more capable of realizing pleasure.
It is also true that the more you can look forward to a full and blissful existence, the less difficult it will be to give up these destructive patterns on the deepest level imaginable. Then it will be easier to stand on your own feet and to accept the necessary frustrations. This equation of the acceptance of full autonomy with the capacity for pleasure is extremely important to comprehend. For one is not possible without the other. If being a deeply self-responsible and decent person, in the innermost sense of these words, implies to you that your pleasure must be renounced, then you cannot really want pleasure. Or, if you do want it, then you may seek it only in an unhealthy way, as a reward to the good child from an authority figure that you depend on.
However hard it may initially seem to attain selfhood and autonomy in the truest sense of the terms, you will want them if you know that your fear of pleasure will disappear proportionately to the progress of your self-purification. To the degree that you assume what seems at first the hardship
of adulthood, with all its ramifications, to that degree something in you will ease up and will feel less and less threatened. As a result, you will become increasingly open to pleasure in its deepest and fullest sense.
All of you can meditate on this equation: the connection between emotional maturity and all that it entails on the one hand, and the realization of personal pleasure on the other. This is really very logical, my friends. For you know that you can truly love only when you are self-responsible, not when you cling to or are dependent on someone else. Such dependency may have the superficial appearance of love, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, dependency stems from fear and creates greater fear. Therefore it inevitably also creates resentment and hate. You try very hard to conceal these feelings because it is threatening to experience hate for the person whom you need and therefore depend on.
Love is possible only when you are free: when you are a self unto yourself, without depending on another. And pleasure is possible only when you love. Sexual pleasure without love is incomplete and must always wind up in a dead-end street. There will always be something missing. Loveless sexuality is an expression of an inner division between the spirit, the soul, and the body. Pleasure is totally unified when you are loving and you are expressing yourself as a sexual being. For then you are also a spiritual being. This means that you have emotional integrity and mental integrity. Therefore pleasure and spirituality, pleasure and decency, pleasure and emotional maturity, pleasure and physical health are all intricately and intimately connected.
Now let us consider the obstructions to pleasure. I would like to say that some of you who are here for the first time and who may be unfamiliar with the concepts we are working with may not know what I am
talking about when I mention the fear of pleasure. For on the surface you all want pleasure and you long for it. To some extent you really strive for it. You believe that you want it, but you ignore the fact that you also do not want it, that, in fact, you desperately fear it. Those who are already somewhat advanced on this path -- and who therefore have explored their own unconscious to a sufficiently profound degree -- have found that they are often terrified of pleasure, that perhaps they are even more afraid of pleasure than of the negative feelings within themselves, or of
those coming toward them from others. I have already pointed out the connection between the fear of the negative feelings in yourself and in others, and the fear of pleasure within you. For it is only because you fear pleasure that you then inadvertently, but logically, want the opposite, namely unpleasure. You must then fear the results of this negative desire, for deep inside you know that what you want will be so. The less conscious you are of what you want, the more you must fear what will happen to you. This is why a fear of death, for example, always indicates an unconscious death wish.
The fear of pleasure must be made conscious in order for you to battle it. If it is not, then your battle against this unconscious fear of pleasure will manifest consciously in an excessive striving for pleasure, in an anxiety about being able to realize it, and in a pessimism or even in a hopelessness about it. This unconscious battle will make you fluctuate between two damaging extremes: resignation and compulsive, blind --
and consequently inappropriate -- over-activity. This behavior obstructs the attainment of pleasure to a considerable degree. Conversely, pleasure becomes possible when the inner state -- the state of both the mind and the emotions -- is quietly confident, calmly expectant, receptive, patient, not anxious, unhurried, and unworried. To recapitulate: when pleasure is missing, then one of the first obstructions to look for is the dichotomy between anxious striving and the hopeless resignation that arises from an unconscious rejection of the desired result. In other words, the unawareness of your fearing what you desire must be transformed into an acute and direct awareness of it. Although this is not easy, it is certainly possible on this path. Anyone who seriously wants to can obtain the awareness of this unconscious fear of pleasure, and therefore of his rejection of pleasure.
I said in the last lecture that your negative creations -- your negative pleasures -- must be made conscious in order to be overcome. By the same token, it is necessary to be in touch with your denial of pleasure. I might safely say that no human being is completely free of this denial. Only the degree varies. To those of you who are relatively free from the fear of pleasure, I say: Do not overlook those areas within yourself where you still shrink away from pleasure as if it were a danger. Meditate and commit yourself to wanting to be aware of this
fear. Then the next step can be taken: the exploration of the validity or the invalidity of this fear so that you will want to give up this fear, this obstruction to your pleasure. Only when you are acutely conscious of how you fear and deny your own pleasure will you stop making others responsible for your deprivation. This is a displacement which makes you suffer keenly. Then the deep inner burden of being puzzled and hopeless about not attaining what you deeply yearn for will dissolve. This burden is subtle and unpronounced. Therefore, assert in full consciousness: "I am afraid of pleasure." Then your hopelessness will disappear. Instead, you will feel the two forces within you: the one pulling you toward pleasure and the other pushing you away from it. You will feel these two forces on all levels of your being, both in your mind and in your feelings. For when the battle goes on unbeknownst to your conscious mind, then it is extremely painful. Once you know of its existence, then you can begin to settle the conflict. It can never be dealt with while it is unconscious. This is why making any inner condition conscious is the most important undertaking for any human being. Just as it is impossible to overcome your destructiveness and your negativity without knowing that you want to be negative, so it is impossible to settle this struggle within you unless you know, you feel, and you experience that this fight goes on. Only then can you free yourself of the vague anxiety and the feelings of hopelessness and inadequacy which are the result of your not knowing that you deny what you want In other words, that you wish something on the one hand and that you fear it on the other hand.
Just as with the negativity which I discussed in the last lecture, you will also have to find out both the reasons for your denial of pleasure
and the further consequences of it. The first thing I would like to
say about why you are afraid of pleasure is this: your holding on to your negativity -- your not wanting to give up your destructive patterns of
behavior and your negative feelings -- makes you unconsciously feel
not only undeserving, but also actually frightened of real pleasure. It is too frightening for you to be open to it because your negativity creates a state of soul and body that is essentially incompatible with pleasure. Your negativity creates tension, separateness, and contraction. Your negativity comes from an excessive ego-orientation. Therefore, it is totally alien to a state of pleasure. Negative pleasure is always more geared to gratifying ego goals than to fulfilling the real and legitimate need of an entity to bathe in the light of pleasure supreme.
Negative pleasure harbors the three attitudes which are at the root of all destructiveness and of all the deviations: pride, selfwill, and fear. Where there is pride, where there is selfwill, and where there is fear there must be a state of contraction. Contraction can never be fully given up, no matter what therapy approaches are used or how good they are, if pride, selfwill, and fear are not abandoned. In pride, selfwill, and fear the ego structure becomes tighter and more rigid.
Selfwill clamors, "me, me, me." All it wants to gratify is the little self, the self that stakes its existence solely on the outer, conscious ego personality and that either completely ignores or rejects the Greater Consciousness, the Cosmic Consciousness, the Universal Consciousness, of which the self is an expression. Unless the total person is unified with this Greater Consciousness that transcends the ego, then it becomes imperative to hold on to the ego. The ego would not be so emphasized if you did not falsely believe that the self is annihilated the moment the ego is not the sole ruler of human life. Hence, when you identify exclusively with your ego, then you can identify neither with the Greater Consciousness nor with the feelings in your body, for the two go hand in hand. The direct experience of the spontaneous feelings in your body is as much an expression of the universal truth of being as the guidance, the inspiration, and the knowledge that flow spontaneously into you when you identify with the You that extends beyond your ego consciousness. If you identify with the ego, then you create a tightness in the ego structure that says, in effect: "It is my ego world that counts. This is all there is to me and therefore I cannot give it up. If I do, then I will cease to exist." With this attitude, pleasure becomes impossible, for total pleasure, real pleasure depends on the ability of the ego to let go of itself and to let itself be carried and enlivened by a greater power within the body and within the soul.
Pride says, "I am better than you." Pride means separateness, it means one-upmanship, it means everything that is opposed to a state of love. But pride may also manifest as, "I am worse than others. I am worthless. I have no value. But I must hide this fact, and so I will pretend that I am more." These thoughts are not articulated, of course, but they may
not be altogether unconscious. This distorted pride -- as opposed to healthy dignity -- is based on constantly measuring and comparing the self with others. Thus, the self is perpetually in illusion, for no true evaluation can ever come from such measuring. It is a hopeless and endless chase for an illusory goal. It is a pursuit that leaves the personality not only exhausted, but also more and more frustrated. As the chasm between the self and others increasingly widens, love becomes less possible, and hence pleasure is further removed. It does not matter whether you actually think that you are better than others, or whether you only pretend that you
are in order to hide your feelings of worthlessness. It is all the same. This attitude cannot produce love. And in a loveless state how can true pleasure ever be realized? Love is not a command that is supposed to deprive you. On the contrary, it is the most selfish -- in the positive sense
-- of all the attitudes, for it brings the greatest of all pleasures. It brings bodily pleasure, mental pleasure, and emotional pleasure. Love simply feels good in you. Love opens you up. Therefore, you flow and you pulsate in a state of peace, of security, of vibrancy, of excitement, of stimulation, and of utter confidence. When you love, then both your innermost being and your outer limbs feel sweet and fulfilled. In contrast, when you are in an ego state of pride, then you must be tense, anxious, and contracted. Pride always leads to and requires defenses
of some sort. And you cannot be relaxed as long as you are pretending. A relaxed state, one that is free of struggle and pretense, is the absolute prerequisite for pleasure.
Fear is a total contraction. In a state of fear one cannot trust one's own self, one cannot trust anyone else, and one cannot trust the universe. The self that is in a state of fear cannot let go of itself. Pleasure is unrealizable when the personality is bound to the ego, bound in selfwill, bound in pride, bound in fear, bound in negativity, bound in the struggle within itself that denies its existing negativity, and therefore does not know that its negativity even exists. Hence the self does not know the nature of its suffering. The self is bound in the struggle of both wanting and fearing the same end. The unawareness of this struggle leads to frustration, to discontent, and to rendering others responsible for what is missing. This blaming, in turn, elicits resentment, bitterness, anger, and defiance. The confusion that results is then torment for the soul.
The realization of the pleasure that you all deeply long for comes from letting go of all these destructive attitudes. Let me elaborate on relaxation. A totally relaxed inner state is needed for pleasure. But relaxation is not to be confused with passivity, with apathy, with paralysis, with inertia. True relaxation is a constant, harmonious movement. It is the movement of the universe. Any human entity who is free enough to be in this unified state of pleasure will feel the cosmic pulsating rhythm and will be in harmony with it. This pleasurable rhythm of the universe is in each microcosmic universe. Experiencing it means being finely attuned to the cosmic rhythm within. It means following not the distortions, but the soul movements that are the reflections of the greater cosmos. In order to be thus attuned, then an inner calmness must prevail. All the agitation of the mind must settle down. The turbulence must cease. Then another kind of movement within you will make itself known. This movement is neither active nor passive in the outer sense. Rather, it combines an inner activity and a movement of the most pleasurable rhythm with an inner calm receptivity and an apparent motionlessness. This motionlessness is not contradictory to the
movement, but is an intrinsic part of it. You see, what appears to be
a contradiction on the ego level becomes a unification on a different level. In that unified state there can exist no division or struggle between the various aspects of the self. In that state there is no harassment from time, for there is timelessness, even now, while you are in the body.
We take it for granted that this unified state cannot be realized at all times. But it can be realized again and again, each time leaving you a stronger, more complete person, with your ego fully intact and yet more integrated with the greater self. By now it is self-evident that development, growth, and the evolution of the individual must bring you to
more frequent realizations of this state of unity. This unified state is most significantly and intensely experienced in a love relationship. But in different ways you will experience this state in all you do, in the way you live, in the way you move, in the way you exist in the universal consciousness, in all your undertakings, in your very being.
It is possible to transcend any given moment, no matter how unpleasurable. If you go sufficiently deeply into yourself to fully explore the you of this moment, of this situation, and if you do not escape from it, then the moment of unpleasure must turn into its ultimate nature:
pleasure supreme. It is not easy to explore yourself in this way when
you perceive yourself as being separate, which you may still do even after
you have experienced some of the truths and the states that I have mentioned here. Such a state of disconnectedness requires your probing and your groping for a balance. On the one hand, you must find the right measure of self-discipline, of self-facing, and of the good will to see the truth and change the destructiveness. On the other hand, there must be a patient letting go and a waiting, a trusting expectancy. You have to find the right answers and the proper attitudes -- in other words, the right way -- and you have to find the right measure of both struggling and not struggling. Your memory of a former similar state will be of little help. The truth must be recaptured anew each time. Memory will only help you to know that the truth can be attained and that it is not an illusion.
It is not easy to transcend your now and to live according to the cosmic rhythm within yourself. But the more often you attempt it, the more often it will become possible, until the connection to the inner rhythm eventually becomes your normal state and the disconnectedness becomes the exception. The difficult times will increasingly serve the purpose of bringing you nearer to your inner center of being, where pleasure supreme reigns. Then the difficult moments will be the catalysts they are meant to be in order to prepare your whole person for the unconflicted state of pleasure within you. As you accept the pain that you have created through your misconceptions and your destructiveness -- in other words, as you explore it rather than cringe or run from it -- as you hold still instead of fighting against this pain with your subterfuges, with your negativities, with your games, with your roles, with your pretenses, with your projections, and with your escapes -- in other words, as you truly look at yourself -- then the attainment of the state of being in pleasure will increasingly unfold itself for you. Ultimately, you will become an integral part of it. This must be your aim.
So pleasure is, at one and the same time, the ultimate spiritual goal and the ultimate human goal. Pleasure is also the curative agent without which you cannot heal.
I think that you are beginning to realize more and more that a path such as this is not to be treated as a difficulty or as a chore. Every aspect of it is a most joyful thing in itself, not only because it ultimately brings liberation, but because even now -- when you are struggling -- each
time you win a battle this path brings you bliss to varying degrees.
The degree depends exactly on your ability to overcome your resistance to struggling and to winning.
Be in the state of bliss that is your birthright, that is the ultimate destiny of all of you. Realize the truth that there is nothing to fear. Be blessed.
November 7, 1969
Copyright 1969, the Center for the Living Force, Inc.