Balance

In my last post when I talked about pleasure and pain, I forgot to mention the fact that pleasure and pain are just two sides of the same problem. Whenever you feel pleasure, you can be sure that you will also feel pain in the future. Things just naturally happen that way. You never continuously feel pleasure; a painful time always comes, just like the fact that it rains some days and is sunny other days. In a way pleasure is pain, and pain is pleasure, because they create each other; they are recognizable by each others' existence. We also see them as separate things because that is how our mind perceives them, but they are really one movement; they make up a whole together. If you put the two together, you see the whole circle. You step off the merry-go-round. 

Buddha said to walk the middle path. Do not seek out extreme pleasure or pain, unless you want their opposites. Do everything knowing what you are doing, and knowing the other side of it. Intentionally seeking pleasure or pain, enslaves you to material conditions. Step back, take a look at how you are feeling, and know it is just a passing condition, like a cloud in a sky. Right now we always think we are the clouds in the sky. But we are actually the sky; infinite. So if you try to get extreme pleasure, you will keep identifying yourself with an impermanent condition, and it will be harder to walk the middle path, as Buddha said. I think he suggested the middle path because it is easier to reach spiritual understandings when you are not letting yourself be tossed around by extremes. 

When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.

Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.

Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn't possess,
acts but doesn't expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.

-From the Tao Te Ching