Freedom is a higher value than our security. That is why we propose, at the risk of losing the security of our pleasure, to talk about the things that remain unspoken.
I mean, who wants to talk about addiction when we have phenomena like UNTOLD to forget about it? Who wants to talk about subjects like the residents of the Borșa chronic psychiatric asylum when we have Planet Christmas? Here we can serve delicacies at exorbitant prices while listening to a concert that stirs up a storm of magical sensations in our flesh. Let’s face it, unpleasant things demand to be covered up, like buildings that have been waiting to be renovated for years, and to make the waiting possible, we dress up the monument in a textile wrap… We don’t want to talk about pain and real solutions, we prefer the solution of forgetting the pain, it’s simpler, more comfortable, it conserves better the little energy we lack anyway…
There is a Twitter post by Deepak Chopra from around 2013 that has gone viral among social media consumers and it says the following:
“Fear is the memory of pain. Addiction is the memory of pleasure. Freedom is beyond both.”
I can’t call myself a fan of Deepak Chopra. But this lack of admiration is a mere opinion, a mere superficial expose on some of his statements, one lacking quantitative data on his actions. But the fact is that his quotation piqued my interest, even captured my attention, and not because I spent a lot of time analyzing what he really meant, but from the perspective of how I understood him through my own experiences and concerns. So, in this text, I will spend a little time to reflect on these lines.
Fear is the memory of pain, the first part of Deepak Chopra’s statement tells us. Fear is perhaps the most biological emotion, because it is closely related to the annihilation of our bodily being, to our physical death. We fear death, we want to be alive and to live, I think that’s pretty obvious to everyone. And the prevention of death, that is, our end as a bodily existence, as an existence in the world, is our main concern and preoccupation. Every time we hurt, whether we’ve hit our knee or someone we love has offended us or even died, we are reminded that we are fragile and limited, that we will die and this body in which we live our lives will come to an end. This is the meaning of grief, the meaning of the anticipated experience of death. On the one hand it prevents death, as when we burn ourselves and learn that it is not good to hold our hand to the flame, but also to realize again the reality of death, of our lack of control in the face of this inevitable phenomenon. Pain is the awareness and prevention of death. But when pain becomes a part of our self through traumatic memory, especially through various forms of abuse, there is a transcription of this pain on a physical level. The fear of death becomes fixed in our bodies at the molecular level and reshapes our brain anatomy and nerve circuit dynamics. So yes, the constant living in a horizon of fear, of the urgency of death, whether we speak of expressing this state through an inner aggressiveness, an outer aggressiveness or even through freezing, through passivity, is based on the memory of a form of pain internalized psychologically. A trauma that our self experiences circularly at the level of the mind, so that it comes to see threats even where they do not exist. And fear, from an emotion useful for everyday survival, becomes the burden of the pain-filled past.
Addiction is the memory of pleasure. Because we don’t want to experience the memory of our pain again and again, because the suffering that comes from repeatedly confronting such a past is too intense, we turn to sensations that make us forget who we are. The memory of our self has so much pain in it, pain that we don’t know how to integrate, how to use it towards our growth, so we choose to dissolve into an ecstatic experience. But when pleasure does not arise from the sense of doing something meaningful, of doing something that makes us evolve, that makes us grow, it is used illegitimately for its mere experience and the effects that follow from it. It is sought as a reward in itself, instead of becoming a reward for the achievement of goals, and so we become addicted to pleasure. Achieving goals can also become a form of addiction, but this is not the subject of our text. We want to discuss here the addiction to pleasure, and the use of pleasure to forget painful memories. And how do we achieve this as quickly as possible, whether by going to the confessor, the psychologist, or by assuming a disciplined lifestyle in which everything that is in you is accepted? Or by intense stimuli, which can activate in you through chemical molecules an explosive euphoria? Aren’t we inclined towards quick and pragmatic solutions, especially when we have a very pressing desire to stop feeling pain? Alcohol, narcotics, gambling, pornography, even social media, can give you that instantly. No more time, no more patience, no more long waits for relief to come. All you need is to take your dose and you’ll instantly forget who it hurts you to be…
The quote ends with the following sentence: freedom is beyond both. I mean, freedom is beyond pain and pleasure. This statement by Mr Deepak Chopra seems very mysterious, as if entering into an esoteric realm through it. Do we really think we can get rid of the oscillation between pain and pleasure? That there is a space of unshakable freedom between the compulsive need to run towards pleasure when we feel pain and, between the momentary ecstasy that can always dissolve under the inevitability of pain? What is this freedom, does it not seem rather a state of nothingness? A state that cannot be associated with an external physical context? For many of us it is quite simple: if someone steps on my foot I feel pain, if I eat chocolate I feel pleasure. So what I have to do is to be careful that no one steps on my foot, so I don’t feel pain, and I also need to have access to some chocolate, so I can experience pleasure. Is that it? Or if somebody inevitably steps on my foot, I eat some chocolate to comfort myself, and if I eat too much chocolate, I will have to expose myself to the pain of doing sports effort, because it is much more painful to carry after me too many kilograms of fat or not fit my clothes from my 20’s? Can we get rid of the two categories, so that if somebody steps on my foot, I will be able to accept the physical sensation simply, without dramatizing the situation and without then needing a kilo of chocolate to ventilate myself emotionally? And if I have a kilo of my favorite chocolate in my face, can I only eat one square, donate the rest of it and afterwards feel the joy of eating my favorite chocolate? And not feel the pain of letting the chance to enjoy some external stimulus that I associate with personal pleasure? It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Is that plausible? A true state of freedom, a state of spiritual freedom, proposes the things that I allowed myself to mention above. This freedom is the power to experience pleasure and to enjoy it, but without letting ourselves be consumed and destroyed by it; but also the strength to experience pain and to assume its real consequences, without deriving our core identity from it, and also, without being overwhelmed by the loss that we suffer.
Jesus Christ says in John 8:32, “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” And the truth is that we can’t control anything external to us in a very strict way. Even our internal actions are most often characterized by old behavioral patterns, then by the freedom to choose our attitude to what we experience. We can’t control the pain we’ve been subjected to, we cannot control the constancy of pleasure in our lives, nor can we control any of them by cyclically running from one to the other. We will be free of fear and free of addiction when we no longer seek to control but choose to receive with gratitude the way reality is proposed to us. In this way we will learn to stop repeating what leads us to pain and to cultivate what brings us to true pleasure, to the joy of being alive and rested in who we really are.
Source:
