Trading the Lower Pleasures for the Higher Ones - 04.29.10

Student Question: What if we want to pursue a spiritual journey but we’re not quite ready to release the material possessions, or the work that we find creativity and joy in?

“Well the ego knows nothing other than that,” reminds Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. Thus, the ego hedges its bets, and keeps running on the—at least familiar—treadmill of pain and pleasure. But trading in the lower pleasures for the higher ones does not mean that you’re giving up your life. “It means that that life will now be used for even higher creativity; even higher joy.” Of course, “in the beginning, it’s very difficult to understand that; it can’t be grasped by the mind. But if you desire to know that higher bliss then, if you pray for that, if you talk to the Supreme One about that, then it will be granted: to have the taste of that higher joy that will enable you to let go of the lower that is holding you back—and also producing suffering. . . . And all of the lower pleasures do that. And this is why the great sages of every tradition like the Buddha and Christ and all the other teachers have recommended letting go of those. But it has to be done naturally and wholeheartedly with a realization of what you are getting, not only of what you are losing, so that there is no looking back.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 29, 2010.