Gita 5.22

Sadhak: "But pleasure feels so good in the moment. How can something that brings joy be called a 'womb of sorrow'?"

Guru: "Does it feel good, or does it feel like relief? Examine carefully. When you eat delicious food when hungry, is the pleasure in the food itself, or in the temporary cessation of hunger? When hunger returns, you're back where you started--or worse, because now you know what you're missing."

Sadhak: "But some pleasures seem purely positive--listening to beautiful music, watching a sunset. These don't come from any lack."

Guru: "And when the music stops? When the sun has set? Notice what happens in your mind. There's a subtle reaching--'more, again, don't go.' This reaching IS suffering beginning. The sunset hasn't caused sorrow; your relationship to it--demanding it continue, mourning its passing--that's where sorrow gestates. The wise enjoy the sunset fully precisely because they don't grasp."

Sadhak: "So we should just not enjoy anything? That sounds like a joyless existence."

Guru: "The opposite. The teaching says 'na ramate'--the wise don't delight IN them, meaning they don't place their delight INSIDE these experiences as if the experiences were containers of happiness. They can enjoy a sunset more completely than a grasping person because they're not polluting the experience with anxiety about its ending. True enjoyment requires freedom from need."

Sadhak: "This seems theoretical. In practice, how do I stop finding pleasure in pleasurable things?"

Guru: "You don't stop finding pleasure--you stop seeking happiness there. There's a crucial difference. Pleasure happens; that's biology. But placing your wellbeing, your okayness, your fundamental happiness on the arrival of pleasure and the avoidance of its departure--that's optional, and that's what creates suffering. The wise let pleasure come and go like weather, while remaining rooted in something stable."

Sadhak: "What is this 'something stable'? It sounds abstract."

Guru: "It's actually the most concrete thing there is--more concrete than sensations, which constantly shift. It's your own aware presence, which is there during pleasure and pain alike, unchanged. The mountain doesn't feel better when the sun shines on it or worse when clouds gather. Find your mountain-nature, and weather becomes just weather."

Sadhak: "But I'm human, not a mountain. Isn't this asking me to be something I'm not?"

Guru: "You're asking to be something you already are but have forgotten. The mountain-nature isn't something to achieve but to recognize. Right now, as we speak, there's an aware presence hearing these words--that presence isn't disturbed by the content. Find what's already stable, and you'll stop desperately needing pleasure to 'make' you stable."

Sadhak: "If pleasures have beginning and end, do sorrows also end? At least that's some comfort."

Guru: "Yes, contact-born sorrows also end. But here's the trap: the ending of sorrow feels like pleasure! So you're back on the wheel--pleasure ending causes sorrow, sorrow ending feels like pleasure, and round you go. The wise step off the wheel entirely, not by eliminating experiences but by finding what's always present beneath the spinning."