#day204 — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #day204, aggregated by home.social.
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Wherever thought builds up the image of pleasure, it must inevitably be lust and not the freedom of passion. If pleasure is the main drive, then it is lust. When sexual feeling is born out of pleasure, it is lust. If it is born out of love it is not lust, even though great delight may then be present. Here we must be clear and find out for ourselves whether love excludes pleasure and enjoyment. When you see a cloud and delight in its vastness and the light on it, there is of course pleasure, but there is a great deal more than pleasure. We are not condemning this at all. If you keep returning to the cloud in thought, or for stimulation, then you are indulging in an imaginative flight of fancy, and here pleasure and thought are the incentives operating. When you first looked at that cloud and saw its beauty, there was no such incentive of pleasure operating. The beauty in sex is the absence of the ‘me’, the ego, but the thought of sex is the affirmation of this ego, and that is pleasure. This ego is all the time either seeking pleasure or avoiding pain, wanting fulfilment, and thereby inviting frustration. In all this, the feeling of passion is sustained and pursued by thought, and therefore it is no longer passion but pleasure. The hope, the pursuit, of remembered passion is pleasure.
From The Urgency of Change