Pleasure? Or Happiness?

The world we live in nowadays has become so tensed, selfish, and pressured, that we can no more differentiate between pleasure and happiness!

Those ambitious people who work hard everyday and strive to achieve materialistic success, from getting a Phd in God knows what major, to those who work overtime just to prove to their bosses that they can turn into a working human-robot; they just can't experience real happiness because they are so open to the world, that they are trading the inner with the outer! For example, many people I know have a daily killer routine that can be summarized in: 1- Going to Uni. 2- Going to work. 3- Studying at home. That's pretty much it. And the "happiness" they experience is just body pleasure. They work hard to experience pleasure through the body. Pleasure means sensation, trying to achieve something through the body--- forcing the body to achieve something that is not capable of. Those kind of people are trying in every possible way to achieve happiness through the body.

This is not wrong, but what is wrong is getting caught up in that vicious cycle. Why is't a cycle? Because simply body pleasure doesn't last. Its just a temporary state of feelings and sensation that will be followed by pain, and then pleasure and then pain and the cycle goes on. This is because the body exists in the world of duality. Just as the day is follow by night, life is followed by death, winter is followed by spring.... pleasure is followed by pain. And what is more toxic to the human mind is that we get so caught up in the small moment of pleasure that we can't even experience it all. We are scared and fear creeps to that small tiny moments because we don't want it to go away and we don't want the pain back. So even in that small fragment of true happiness, we are not comfortable.

Body pleasure is just through food or sex. We stop doing one, the energy of the second will increase. We stop doing sex, we eat double amounts. Many are living to eat, only a few who eat to live. We stop eating, and the energy of hunger will accumulate, we become tense and heavy and we just want to let it all out. So we go and have sex. We release. Pressure is lost. But its just a matter of time before it accumulates once again. Like a pendulum we keep moving between the two. This is the world of Pleasure.

On the other hand, we have people who have a good balance in their lives, and aren't as robotic as those we mentioned above. A good balance is balancing between the inner and the outer, the yin and the yang. Those who meditate, for example, start moving in a transitory state from being dead, soulless ,mind-controlled robots, to awakened humans. Happiness to them becomes more of a quality and less quantity. More psychological and less physiological. They enjoy music more, poetry more, painting, they enjoy creating something. They find comfort in nature, and many other stuff. And this is far more lasting than shallow pleasure. Something just lingers on to you when you visit a nature site or listen to good song.

The difference between this happiness and pleasure above is that pleasure is relief, only. While this happiness isn't relief, its merely enriching your soul. When you go visit a forest or a virgin land or listen to good music, you feel something rising in your soul! Something is triggered in your being, harmony rises! You may dance, sing along, melt with your surrounding, the weight of gravity no more controls you, you are free from the chains of pleasure and the toxic cycle.

Pleasure is dependant on others. Happiness isn't that depending, but it is still a bit separate from you. Bliss is not dependant and is not separate; it is our very being, our right. Seek it!
Don't remain lost in the jungle of pleasure, for its a gruesome wilderness. Seek happiness, just rise a bit from that pleasure, and then to bliss. Pleasure is animal, happiness is human, bliss is divine!