The Creation of Pleasure and Pain :3.

The world is relative, relational, conditioned by the dependence of objects on their experiencers, and vice versa. Any object is beautiful or otherwise in accordance with the specific relationship it has with us; otherwise, it is neither beautiful nor ugly. The ethical and moral judgments of good and bad are also purely objective. They are to be judged from a particular context. We cannot know whether a particular action is right or wrong unless the context also is known, so this context is the relationship of the particular occasion for judging. A superior insight would be the detection of there being a causative factor, known as relationship, higher above the pure structural context of the objects and persons in the world. Where does the source of suffering lie? It is not in the objects, but in our relationship with objects.



Can we say the relationships themselves are the causes of pleasure and pain? This is a question that we have to raise further on. The relationships are only psychological. They are not physical. What causes pleasure and pain to us is naturally a relationship of objects with ourselves. But what sort of relationship is it? It cannot be called a physical or material relationship. It is not a substantial contact of the object with us. A thing may not be physically in contact with us; it may be spatially distant and still cause pleasure and pain by an inwardly directed relationship of the object with its mental relationship. So while it is a very interesting discovery that we have made – we learned that objects are not the sources of pain but the relationships of objects with us are the sources of pain – even this is not an adequate discovery because we cannot say that there is any such thing as relationships outside us. All relationship is internal.

Swami Krishnananda

To be continued   ...