June 26, 2025
Principle 6. Pleasure. Fourth Week
“If you pursue pleasure, you enchain yourself to suffering. But as long as you do not harm your health, enjoy without inhibition when the opportunity presents itself.”
Last time: Neither the Carrot nor the Stick.
This time: A Look Ahead
This Week:
Over the last three weeks we considered this principle in general: what it means, how it fits in with the others, etc. We also looked at how we did or didn’t use this principle in past situations, and how it applies to the present. This week we’ll try to understand how we might apply the principle in the future.
To help gain some new perspectives we will also play the game of Explain It!
At our next meeting we will discuss our observations, thoughts, reflections, and questions regarding all this.
Homework for the Week
-The principle in the light of your hopes and fears.
-Play the game of Name It!
-A special meditation for the end of the month.
What about the End of the Month?
I was thinking about the suggestion that Silo made to reflect once a month on our internal growth in relation to life difficulties. That's something we do as a whole whenever we have a fifth meeting in our monthly cycle. But that fifth monthly meeting is not a common event, and his comment proposed a weekly monthly. So, I’ve adopted the practice of adding that reflection during the last week of every month. I mention this in case you might think it worth trying yourself.
General Considerations and Personal Reflections
Here’s somethings I was thinking about:
These are personal reflections. I offer them in the spirit of dialogue and exchange, and look forward to hearing your thoughts about, and experiences with, this principle.
Thinking about how this principle might apply to the present seemed less clear to me than how it was, or would have been, useful for me in the past. Given that, how can I begin to think about its relevance to my future situations? Or is it simply that I see the past more clearly because it is gone? Is it that the pleasures and pursuit that attract me now invisible precisely because they are not the ones I see clearly as they fade into the past? Is it because I’m so wrapped up in them that I can’t even imagine anything else?
Do I find myself, at this moment of life, free from the enchainment to the search for pleasure? Perhaps I am I mistaking a different background climate, a different internal landscape, different desires and ways of searching for the absence of these things? If not pleasure (and its pursuit) what is it that motivates me every day? Why do I choose this thing and not another. Can I enjoy pleasures but not pursue them? I who am frustrated at every little inconvenience, impatient with others, and with circumstance? I don’t even seem capable of noticing my attachments to things, until I try to give them away, or they are taken from me.
The Game of the Week.
Explain It!
The rules for this week’s game are simple and summed up in its name.
Of course, just as with other games, I might find myself with no one to play with. For example, no one of whom I can either ask their opinion, or tell them mine.
Such a situation might well be an opportunity to reflect on what that absence implies, and perhaps even take measures in enrich my social environment.
Another thing this game has in common with the game of Ask About It! is that it’s a game! In this game our interest is on engaging and communicating. Convincing, preening, recruiting, etc. are outside of the goals of the game. Rather, you are simply sharing your interpretation of something you find interesting.
Remember
- the principle in relation to what my future might hold
-Play the game of Explain It!
-Reflect on my internal growth in relation to the difficulties in mylife.
Worth Repeating:
Digging deeply into your own experience, consistently seeking to transform the principles into the coherent expressions of a particular mental direction — those are exactly the kinds of things that can convert platitudes into principles—even transform principles into a way of life, an unending and dynamic meditation.
Coming Up:
This document is meant as a support for our practice of focusing on one of the 12 Principles of Valid Action each month. Next week we will turn to principle 7, the principle of Immediate Action.
Note:
Thanks once again to Rafa for the photograph. These notes have been posted on Facebook and sent to our email list, and, on my website www.dzuckerbrot.com
Don’t forget:
In some moment of the day or night inhale a breath of air, and imagine that you carry this air to your heart. Then, ask with strength for yourself and for your loved ones. Ask with strength to move away from all that brings you contradiction; ask for your life to have unity. Don't take a lot of time with this brief prayer, this brief asking, because it is enough that you interrupt for one brief moment what is happening in your life for this contact with your interior to give clarity to your feelings and your ideas.
Silo_ La Reja, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2005
