There is never a time in life to celebrate or to enjoy oneself. Never, ever. Our life, if lived well and even enjoyably, must be spent in unwavering and high discipline. Only disciplined people can truly enjoy life. Enjoyment through drink or partying is very superficial enjoyment. Real enjoyment can only be obtained by the virtue of living itself. And to enjoy the virtue of living, one needs discipline.
To make things more simple, life can only be enjoyed by living in the moment, and always doing whatever you are doing for the sake of doing it, and not for the sake of something else.
I think I must give some examples.
When washing your clothes, you must wash them with no other purpose than with the purpose of … Washing your clothes! You must not do it so that your clothes may be clean, or because it has to be done, or for the sake of cleanliness, or for any other reason apart from washing you clothes!
What that means is, whatever you do, do it with complete commitment and do it for the sake of doing it nicely and beautifully. It is wrong to play football very well because you enjoy doing it, while you don’t maintain your garden properly because you do not like doing it.
This means, all in all, that one must get rid of the concept of past and future, and exist forever, solely in the very immediate present. Believe me, that is the only way to live a life. And it requires extreme self control to not think about the past or near future, that is why I said that one needs extreme discipline.
Let me just give you a good statement… It almost encompasses all that I want to say…
Extraordinary people do the ordinary things extraordinarily well.
The kind of joy obtained by living in the present is incomparable with any other joy, and it is the true joy. Actually, it is not joy, but peace.
You approach sounds bhuddist if I understood it correctly.
If you force yourself not to think about the past or near future then you have assumed that there is nothing to learn from these otherwise mundane activities (as thinking about what has just happened and what may happen are critical parts of learning) and instead meditate while you work? To live life not for joy but for peace does not sound like living, but a means of escape.
If you are not washing your clothes so that your clothes may be clean then why would you ever wash your clothes? You seem to be telling us that everything you do must be carried out for no reason at all, or else it should not be done. Could you please clarify why an action must be pointless?
It is rather obvious that clothes must be washed so that they must be clean. But the point is not that…
I must accept that without some amount of thinking about the past or future, things will be rather impossible…
However, take this example…
Have you ever played a sport? Let me give you an example. Suppose you are playing football. Now it is quite obvious that the objective of football is to score more goals than your opponent. However, the fun about playing football is not scoring more goals than your opponent, but the subtle things like that soft touch to move the ball just 1cm, or that perfect pass that just beats the defender, etc. Now you can’t enjoy these things if you’r focused just on winning. These things are enjoyable when they are just done for their sake. And of course, they are done better this way. Which means that when you concentrate on the quality of every unit, the aggregate product has a higher quality. And if you are still concerned about winning that game, then the chances are that you have won it anyway, and even if you havn’t, you’ve enjoyed it immensely, so it shouldn’t matter.
Now about the subject of learning from the past, there is no doubt that it must happen. But I belive it happens rather automatically, even when you do not think about it. And, generally, as I have observed, when you probe into the mistakes of the past, you generally realise that they happened because you were not putting your 100% into what you were doing. And i believe that this philosophy permits probing into the past, if you do it conciously and objectively, in the present moment.
And if you belive that living life not for enjoyment but for peace is a means of escapism, either you have not experienced true peace, or you have experience it and ot understood it. If you live life for plaeasure, pain is an inevitable by product of pleasure, and I won’t spend time elaborating on that, check it up on my blog.
I would not say that pain is a byproduct of pleasure but that both pain and pleasure are a byproduct of life. If you are avoiding ‘pleasure’ in order to avoid pain then you are trying to avoid part of living, which is escapeism. It sounds like you are not trying to avoid pleasure though, as you seem to be taking pleasure in savoring daily sensations.
I have experience moment of peace, and they were not of happiness but of wanting for nothing. This is the easiest type of existence as it leads along life’s path of least resistance, but concludes with personal stagnation. If you want to develop as a consiousness you should lead a life where you make room for pleasure and pain and accept them both.
I believe that there is a huge difference between the pleasure (if you would like to call it that) derived by savouring the moments of life and the pleasure derived by, say, doing drugs or by gossiping about somebody. The differences are just too many, to a point where they become different things. Also, it is very simple to derive pleasure by the latter method, but it takes discipline to derive pleasure by the earlier method. I might say that maybe the former kind of pleasure is a form of peace itself.
I would personally like to believe that if one lives life with both pleasure and pain, which, as you believe is an essential component of life, then the system breaks down in the long term due to the effects of these “roller- coster rides.” The more the pleasure, the more the pain, as you know, and what remains is chaos. I do not know whether you know the “Parent Adult Child” concept, because it is very easy for me to explain all this in those terms. Yes, searching for peace is a form of escapism, but it is an escapism from the madness that is prevalent everywhere!
I agree with you, that happiness is enjoying the Process (even it’s washing clothes).
The other thing is you mentioned the present time.
My question is does the present time exist? Future turns into past immediately. So, what do you mean by present time?
I dont really agree with what talentedidiot is saying because it just doesnt seem to make sense one way or the other. It seems it would make the most sense to avoid either extreme. I don’t think I could spend my life concentrating on trying to derive pleasure from things that really give me no pleasure and deriving no more pleasure from things that truly do give me pleasure and excite me.
I am not this sort of robot to be trained in such a way that I should derive an equal amount of pleasure from everything I do. As an individual there are certain things that I enjoy, certain things that I loathe, and certain things that I must grin and bear as it is part of life.
In the end, whether I live this way or in the way that talentedidiot proposes, I will end up dead. No amount of me perfecting a even spread amount of pleasure from life will stop the eventuality of death. IMO, I would rather have spent my life enjoying things that I enjoyed, taking pleasure in things that I took pleasure in, and discovering more of what these things are for me, rather than trying to derive an equal amount of pleasure in cleaning my laundry.
Perhaps it would be useful to take the perspective of simply being, and not being as. The fewer pre-conceived ideas we bring to any experience, the more likely we will see and interact out of our natural being. In this, we see directly, and act directly in an efficacious way. There is much more complexity that talentediodiot has offered.
I agree with your basic premise concerning discipline.
It can be called asceticism.
Of course both “truth†and “happiness†are unattainable to man.
It is their myth that exemplifies man’s dissatisfaction and need.
From my perspective – and I admit Schopenhauer was an influence – there is no pleasure but only different levels of suffering.
Pleasure is a condition in reference to a past condition, whereas suffering is a condition in reference to the universe.
Suffering represents life’s, and as a consequence, the universe’s instability – it’s flux.
Life echoes an incompleteness, seeking satiation, and felt, by the conscious mind as Need.
Life is Need animated and then made conscious, through the necessity of making the feeding of Need more efficient.
Proof of this is that we are never satisfied. Our bodies constantly absorb and feed on the environment.
Our hunger is satiated temporarily because we have evolved a digestive system that stores resources, from which the body constantly pulls its need from.
Our breathing better displays the constancy of need, since here the absence of an adequate storage compartment necessitates a constant taking in, from the environment, of what is needed.
I’ve posted something on the subject, if it interests you. It is my take on your thesis.