Pleasure as Spiritual Practice

Liberation through Joy?

As an exuberant experiment, I invite you to imagine that your drive to experience pleasure doesn’t hinder your spiritual growth but facilitates it.

Imagine that your yearnings for beauty, fun, sex, and revelry aren’t distractions from your growing capacity for liberation, but primary fuel.

Proceed on the hypothesis that cultivating joy and celebration can make you a more ethical and conscientious person.

Research the possibility that when you feel good, you’re more generous toward others.

Trust that when your inner life is humming with gleeful musings, you find it easier to extend patience to the difficult, grace to the clumsy, and mercy to the fallen.

Test the theory that compassion streams more freely from your overflowing lust for life than from your grinding sense of duty.

Expect that delight has an interesting teaching for you every day.

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What I just said is the essence of my message for you at this perfect moment. Below, I elaborate further.

Many spiritual systems the world has inherited regard pleasure, bliss, rapture, ecstasy, elation, and related super treasures as troublemakers and distractions.

The so-called “lower self” is greedy for such wasteful irrelevance, the saintly authorities say. “Begone foul deceivers!” they imply or declare outright.

How many zillions of us have been taught, often with dire and threatening tones, that feeling really good leads us away from life’s essential goals? Holiness and sanctity are likely to accumulate in us only if we shun the supposedly inferior temptation to bask in delight.

Say what?

Of all the idiocies foisted on humanity, this one is among the most egregious. I am in danger of veering into apoplexy as I contemplate such an atrocious delusion. I’ll try to be civil.

In both my extensive mythic explorations of dreamy truth and scientific investigations of hard-core reality, I have gathered incontrovertible evidence that pleasure is a central necessity for any spiritual quest that actually works.

It’s a sensory instrument. A tuning fork and a feedback system. A way the body says, Yes, this. More of this. Keep headed in this direction. You’re getting closer to home.

I’m not talking about the jittery sugar-high of addiction or the perverse, jangly thrills that sabotage health.

I mean the rich, ennobling euphoria and exhilaration that arise during encounters with smart fun: inspiring us to love ourselves more, expanding our capacity to love others, leading us in the direction of our shining dreams, and helping us solve our knotty problems.

The eruptions of these life-giving nourishments might come through the stimulation of our senses, emotions, or imagination. And yet they don’t have to yank us away from the sacred. They may in fact be among the sacred’s favorite ways of snagging our attention. Evolution didn’t give us many reliable compasses, but I believe this is one of them.

My comprehensive research reveals that when we feel genuinely good—not inflated or superior, but resoundingly buoyant—our ethics improve. We’re more patient and curious. Less brittle and defensive.

When we’re swooning or even just shimmering with delectation, we see other people more clearly. They’re not obstacles or mirrors of our lack, but fellow creatures doing their best with the weather systems inside them.

By contrast, chronic deprivation, especially when dressed up as virtue, tends to make people tight and pinched and resentful of anyone who looks like they’re enjoying themselves.

Self-denial doesn’t reliably produce saints. Often it just churns out people who are very good at pretending they don’t want what they want.

Those who know how to nurture themselves with good feelings often have a super-capacity to give without keeping score. Their generosity leaks out sideways. There’s surplus.

Here’s my very-well proven hypothesis: Compassion grows less from being twisted up about suffering and more from inhabiting joie de vivre so fully that we want others to feel it too.

So yes: To the horror of the Rabid Life Denialists who equate suffering with virtue, I question their calculations.

With all the confidence possible for a paradox and ambiguity lover like me to summon, I boisterously assert that the real inquiry isn’t “How much can I endure?” but “How much aliveness can I allow without flinching?”

With all the cheerful disdain I have earned the right to express by virtue of my carefully cultivated empathic kindness, I ask, what if generosity of spirit comes not from suppressing our quest for ebullience and gusto, but from celebrating it so thoroughly that scarcity loses its grip?

The blunt, brash, brazen fact is that we are less generous when we’re depleted and forcing ourselves to give out of duty, and more generous when we are lit up and giving feels like play.

The raw, unruly, radical truth is that our best work emerges not when we’re grinding and grueling, but when delight has infiltrated us down to the core of our primal curiosity.

I’ve devised some experiments for those poor souls who have tragically come to believe that pleasure is anathema to their spiritual practice. They’re below.

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Experiments:

• Track the connection between your states of gleeful, zestful pleasure and your capacity for kindness, courage, creativity, and clear seeing.

• Learn to gauge the distinction between exaltations that feed you and diversions that merely numb you. Your body knows the difference long before your theories do.

• Gather evidence to test the theory that the pleasure-versus-enlightenment split is a cosmic practical joke—lazy, outdated, and spiritually disabling.

• Follow your joy, not blindly, not compulsively, but attentively. Watch how it keeps leading you toward becoming more human, responsive, and capable of love.

Addendum: On Joy as Revolutionary Fuel

Some readers may be twitching by now. I hear the objection:

“Rob, have you noticed the world? Children are being bombed. Forests are burning. Aquifers are draining. Tyrants are perpetrating. Democracies are wobbling. Species are vanishing at a pace that ought to make every breathing person weep. And here you are, composing love letters to delight? Have you no sense of proportion?”

I welcome this challenge. I’ve wrestled with it myself many times, often at 3 a.m., when the litany of atrocities scrolls behind my eyelids.

But here’s what I’ve concluded, after years of paying close attention to the people who actually do the work of saving real things: The activist who arrives at the struggle already brittle, depleted, and chronically marinating in their own self-flagellation, will burn out quickly.

The activist who arrives nourished is the one who will still be fighting the good fight in 2046. They know the art of sustaining themselves with real pleasures, anchored in their own aliveness, threaded through with genuine love for the world they’re trying to protect.

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I’ll plant my flag here, even though I know it may scandalize.

The dour, joyless, perpetually outraged zeal for revolution isn’t sustainable. And in many cases, those with that attitude are unwittingly importing the pathology they claim to oppose. (I say this with great tenderness toward my own younger self.)

What’s the worldview of the the colonizer, oligarch, and fascist? It’s precisely that life is scarce and joy must be hoarded or punished. Pleasure is for the few, and beauty is decoration rather than necessity.

When we activists internalize a punishing, pleasure-denying mode of resistance, we replicate the operating system of the empire we’re trying to dismantle. We just point its weapons at ourselves.

The Misery Maximalists will tell you that anyone caught laughing during the apocalypse is morally compromised. I say that anyone who has stopped laughing during the apocalypse has conceded the most important territory.

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History bears me out. The movements that endured and actually changed things were saturated with music, feast, dance, flirtation, ridiculous humor, and the insistence on beauty.

The Black freedom struggle sang its way through difficulty. The labor movement built dance halls. ACT UP staged kiss-ins outside cathedrals. The Zapatistas fielded poetry brigades. The water protectors at Standing Rock drummed and prayed and joked around fires while drone-helicopters thundered overhead. The suffragettes wore stylish hats. The disability justice elders threw parties.

This was the engine of the work, and the reason the work didn’t dissolve into ash.

Joy in the face of monstrousness is the most strategically sophisticated form of resistance available to us. It tells the regime: You don’t get to install your scarcity in my nervous system. You don’t get to make my body a battlefield in your war against everything good.

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Here’s the deepest argument:

The world we’re trying to build is one in which everyone gets to flourish. To embody that flourishing now isn’t a betrayal of the cause. It IS the cause.

If we postpone joy until the revolution is complete, we have already lost. We will arrive at the promised land too desiccated to live there.

To pursue ennobling pleasure right now, in the middle of everything, while still showing up at the protest rally, is good practice: rehearsal for the world we want.

Dear Readers —

I’m wildly grateful for the amazing encouragement you offered me after my report on the people who complain that I “do too much self-promotion.”

See the original discussion here: https://is.gd/5UShgl

It’s gratifying that so many of you find inspiration and support in my newsletters, and don’t mind hearing about—even welcome knowing about—my other creative expressions.

All of my PLURK (Work + Play) is in service to the great Web of Life that we all weave together. You are my teachers and helpers and inspirers, and I aspire to give back to you in kind.

Rowdy blessings,

Rob

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Art in this newsletter by:

Samantha Daniels Napaltjarri

Yvonne Comber

Robin Custance

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

For the Week of April 30

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): May is Free Thinking Month for you Tauruses. It’s also Free Feeling, Free Wheeling, and Free Healing Month. Wow! To observe this festive grace period, indulge in any of the following jubilant acts: 1. Declare your independence from anyone who tries to tell you how you should live your life or who you are. 2. Declare independence from your history, especially recollections that dampen your sense of possibility and old self-images that impede your yearning to explore. 3. Declare independence from groupthink and conventional wisdom. 4. Declare independence from your former conceptions of freedom so you’ll be free to arrive at fresh understandings of it.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): The Navajo practice hózhó means “walking in beauty”: living in balance and harmony with life. But hózhó isn’t a static state you achieve once and possess forever. You must continually restore and reinvent it. I suspect you’re in a phase like that now, Gemini. Too much thinking and not enough feeling? Too much future and not enough present? I recommend you take corrective measures. Start by taking one physical action that grounds you. Have a conversation from the heart instead of the head. Spend an hour not planning the story to come, but simply loving what’s here right now. Refresh your hózhó!

CANCER (June 21-July 22): If a honeybee colony becomes too crowded, scout bees search for potential new hive sites. When they return, they perform waggle dances for their colleagues to convey specific information about different locations. Negotiations ensue. Various possibilities are offered and considered through more dancing. Eventually, the swarm collectively makes a choice and heads out to its new home. Your challenge right now, Cancerian, is to be like a scout bee who facilitates your group’s decision-making process. I invite you to carry out a reconnaissance mission and then perform your waggle dances for your people. Make your case with vigor and precision. Trust the group’s emergent wisdom to make the best decision.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Like all of us, Leo, you have persistent aches from old losses, absences, and wounds. They may seem like permanent burdens you will never be able to shake or transcend. But here’s some very good news: In the coming months, there’s a greater chance than usual that you’ll discover new approaches to healing them. The remedies won’t necessarily be logical or obvious. They may involve you conducting rituals, taking symbolic actions, or ambushing the pain from unexpected angles. Be alert for interventions that may seem too simple or unexpected to work.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Your restlessness is building. How much longer will you pretend you don’t sense the pull of bright temptations and appealing sanctuaries? At what moment will you finally stop resisting your urge to slip past the usual boundaries and roam? The astrological omens hint that this pivot is close at hand. In the borderlands of your imagination, a daring journey is already taking shape. Where might it carry you? Here’s my guess: down into the raw, unfiltered depths of the future you secretly dream about.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): In fairy tales, when heroes are rewarded for their help and kindness, their gifts are often tools of protection: a cloak that renders them invisible, a magic club that chases off foes, or enchanted shoes that enable them to outrun any threat. In other stories, the reward is meant to deepen the hero’s delight in living: a genie’s lamp, a cauldron that cooks up exquisite food, or a horn that calls forth marvelous companions from the fairy world. I mention this, Libra, because I believe rewards for your past and recent generosity are on their way. If you have any say in what form they take, I suggest you request something from this second, pleasure-giving category.

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SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Poet Marie Howe wrote, “I don’t think we can love anything more intensely than we love a secret.” Many Scorpios feel this way. You understand that mystery is often a joy to be savored. Some truths reveal themselves only to those who summon the patient intelligence to be at peace amidst the confounding riddles. Non-Scorpios may be desperate to leave nothing hidden, but you like to learn from the teasing prickles. You know that some transformations need darkness to carry on their work. Your next assignment: Decide what truth needs more time in the deep before it’s ready to surface.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Diamond is the hardest natural substance, while graphite is soft and slippery. Yet they’re both made of pure carbon. The difference is in their structure. Let’s extrapolate from this fact as we ruminate on your life, Sagittarius. I’m 97-percent certain that you already have everything you need. Maybe you imagine you lack key resources and powers, but from what I can tell, you are well set-up. So I propose that you simply reorganize what’s available to you now. Take the “carbon” of your life and arrange it in new patterns. Your task isn’t further accumulation but reconfiguration.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): My Capricorn grandfather was a master artisan. He told me that the best furniture is built twice: first in the imagination, then with wood. Let’s apply that theme to you. I believe you have mostly finished the first step of visualizing what you want. Now you’re almost ready to launch the actual work. I’m eager to see the practical effects that will bloom from your detailed fantasies. The rest of the world is excited, too. These days, we all especially need your talent for turning beautiful dreams into vivid realities. You have extra power to inspire us to convert our idealistic notions into dynamic actions.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): I invite you to imagine a time in the past when you were almost perfectly content. Visualize that magical confluence of satisfying feelings. Where were you? Who was or wasn’t there? What could you see, hear, smell, and feel in your body? What made that moment so right? Next step: Make a vow to rebuild as many of those conditions as you realistically can over the next three weeks. Maybe you can’t recreate the exact scene, but you can approximate its essence.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): The astrological factors now in effect are tending to generate useful and valuable cosmic jokes. I believe they may be disruptive and catalytic in helpful ways. In this spirit, I offer you the following affirmations, borrowed from internet memes: 1. “You may call me ‘melodramatic.’ I describe myself as a ‘creative problem-solver with flair and panache.’” 2. “I’m not overthinking; I’m overriding simplistic answers that hide the real truths.” 3. “You shouldn’t think of me as chaotic; the fact is that I’m generously non-linear.” 4. “I have a solid plan, but it’s always evolving to keep up with reality’s crazy insistence on ceaseless change.” 5. “Please dismantle your low expectations; I need ample room to exceed them.” 6. “I trust my instincts; they have often been wrong in interesting ways.”

ARIES (March 21-April 19): In the 19^th century, Aries photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) resolved to settle a debate about whether galloping horses ever have all four hooves off the ground. He developed a system to capture rapid sequential images, which ultimately helped lead to the invention of motion pictures. His answer to a narrow technical question opened up an entirely new art form. Moral of the story: Solving a specific problem may create unforeseen revolutions. In the coming weeks, Aries, I invite you to stay alert for how your focused efforts to address one challenge might birth even more significant breakthroughs. Don’t get so fixated on your immediate goal that you miss larger innovations emerging from your work.

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