Seeking Pleasure, Evading Pain.

I write this from my small cherry oak desk in a hotel room in Cape Canaveral, FL on a Tuesday night. A lot has changed since the last time I updated this blog. I am no longer a professional firefighter or paramedic practicing emergency medicine. I am, as I have been many times in my life, a student again. Enrolled in orientation classes just prior to additional counter terrorism training I will be attending next week. In several weeks I will be on a jet en route to Kuwait, at which point I will hope aboard a Blackhawk or C-130 and fly to a base in Iraq where I will work out of an emergency clinic for the next year. To my good friends who know me in person and read this, I will not see you until July at the earliest.

There is financial and professional gain at stake here. My well-being is at stake and I would be remiss if I did not tell you that. However, despite the acknowledgement of the imminent hazard of my duty, I fathom that what is most at stake is my spirituality (or lack thereof). I keep quiet about these things typically, but anyone who employs even a slight modicum of investigative work could read past posts on this blog and surmise the Buddhist undertones which guide their vector. If I had to identify, I would say that I am a person who practices Buddhism. I do not employ its teachings dogmatically and will entertain the possibility of any religion (so long as I can find some sort of logical creedence in it) because I do not think the brain was designed to be a rigid thing.

I would like to talk about rigidity of the mind and its origins.

As many Buddhist philosophers have asserted, and as Krishnamurti has asserted in his work "Freedom From The Known", as we accumulate experience and stow it away in the reserves of our minds, we begin to roughly categorize our perceptions as pleasure or pain. The inclination of most people is to seek pleasure and to evade pain. This makes sense in an evolutionary sense as well as a spiritual sense. Most religions could very well be justified from this basic tenet.

The rigidity sets in over time as we preconceive present and future events based on assimilated feelings on past experiences. As an example: you may have stepped on a snake a decade ago and consequently it bit you and it hurt. Thus, to this day you tread carefully along every path. Why? Is there a snake awaiting you at all times? I do not think so. You are behaving according to past experience, and though this example may not resonate, it can be applied to so many things. Ultimately, these preconceptions based on past experience, past pain, implement mental barriers. 'I have driven this vehicle and spent a lot of money buying gasoline to fuel it. I will not buy this vehicle again.' That is a barrier.

The more barriers we put up in our minds, the more rigid the mind becomes. This precludes logic after incessant barrier-making. Before long, you are no longer the wide-eyed youth capable of accepting most things as they are and without predisposition. Instead you are the aging republican who likes only Chevrolet and Coca-Cola products and thinks climate change is a hoax. The problem with this is that the marginalize the capability of the mind, and you dismiss very viable information and possibilities which could make you happier. Furthermore, it simply tends to make you an obtuse and angry individual.

Contrarily, the mind also recalls pleasures. It becomes the mind's inclination to seek pleasure. This fosters addictions to so many things, and these addictions extend beyond the realm of chemicals which we normally consider the addiction culprits. Video games, TV, sleeping in your bed. These are all just fine to an extent but damaging in excess, as anything can be. The mind's preconceptions about pleasure and the past recollection of what is pleasure and what is pain steer us in every moment of our lives. In every moment of our waking lives we are being steered by pleasure seeking and pain avoidance.

That is, unless we employ mindfulness and equanimity.

The key to disrupting this pattern of pleasure seeking and pain avoidance is to acquire and maintain mindfulness. The most severe implication of the pleasure seeking, pain avoiding behavior is that is absolutely robs us of the joy, richness, and intricacies of the present moments. The mind becomes so preoccupied with considering what may happen in the future or fretting over what has happened in the past that we completely ransack the only experience that truly matters: right now! And now. And now!

It will take more than reading a single blog entry to revolutionize your worldview and ease the rigidity of your mind, but it is entirely possible if you resolve that it is absolutely vital to do so. If you want to reacquire presence, and re-live life to its richest extent, hearing music for the first time and watching movies for the first time all over again, then you must shed the habit energy of pleasure seeking and pain avoidance. Pleasure is not the answer to a better life and pain is a gateway to growth. And the mind's machinations to seek and avoid these things completely deprives us of the one truly important moment: now.