The Transformation of Pleasure into Knowledge
The process of spiritual life, by Barry Long
As you live the spiritual life more profoundly, the common feeling of pleasure we all enjoy, gradually transforms. Pleasure may be said to diminish compared with before, and that old part of the brain, being left behind, will feel that something preciously familiar is being lost. The process can be disconcerting and upsetting. But the new consciousness, being finer than the old, will know that the pleasure has more knowledge in it than feeling. The transformation of pleasure is from feeling to knowledge. Between the feeling of pleasure as we all know it and the transcending state of knowledge, is beauty. Beauty is not pleasure: beauty is knowledge. And implicit in the knowledge of beauty is a pleasure that exceeds the common senses. Like the 'peace' Jesus spoke of, the pleasure of beauty passes understanding.
Take a sunset. Sometimes it can be so beautiful it brings tears of pleasure to the eyes. But really there's no feeling in the beauty of a sunset. It's just that we perceive it with the old part of the brain that is addicted to the feeling of pleasure. This part of the brain, on perceiving beauty, can't accept the knowledge and so emotionalises the experience to get some feeling out of it. This pollutes the beauty or knowledge of the sunset, and by identification, reduces the reality of the individual perceiving it.
The gradient of the spiritual life is to leave behind pleasure as you once knew it. This of course accounts for the acute suffering that goes with the spiritual life once you start to live it seriously. For the old perception of pleasure, the searcher for pleasure of the past, is none other than self. And the old self must die. As my old pleasure, my old self dies, I find for instance that I can no longer live in the so-called spiritual community that once gave me the common pleasure of psychological dependence on others. I must leave it behind. The knowledge, the beauty of the now, the new, drives me out to take my chances on being alone. I feel great and I feel terrible, as the old self tries to look back. Also, I find I can no longer enjoy as much the pleasure of being angry, depressed, bitter, jealous and so forth. These are the unsuspected pleasures of ignorance which inevitably follow the common (non-spiritual or selfish) life of searching for pleasure.
Finally I will reach a point of knowledge. I will have access to pleasure and beauty beyond anything I have ever known. I will not have lost my feeling, but it will have been transformed into a sensitivity that requires no memory to give me pleasure. For the common sense of pleasure is to remember or know that you are enjoying yourself. A male example of this is when making love to look at the position of the bodies and so gain the knowledge or memory that in this intimate position is pleasure. For a woman it may be the emotional reflection that she loves the man. But the knowledge of the pleasure of making love is to be one with the stillness and silence and the not knowing of anything but the inherent beauty.