What is pleasure?

[Ahriman]

experiences worth having

So you got me thinking about experiences worth having that are neither utilitarian nor undertaken for pleasure, yet people still do them. There's one category I can think of that sort of fits this.

Japanese didn't have a word for "art" until fairly recently. In the Meiji period scholars started translating German philosophy and realized they lacked such a term, so they settled on 美術 which means "beauty skill." Before that, traditional arts were defined as a "way" rather than as a skill. 

"Way" here is 道, which is the same character as the Tao, in Chinese Taoism. It can also mean simply a street, or a way of doing something. 

Judo 柔道 means "weak way" or "flexible way," something like that. Flower arrangement is flower-way 花道. Tea ceremony is tea-way 茶道. There are lots of others. The point is that these are practices that one does, and in most cases they don't result in any tangible object the way art is said to do. Flower arrangements only last a few days, after all. 書道, "write-way," is calligraphy, and can provide you with a beautiful object, but the emphasis is on practice and one's state of mind while doing it. The goal is beauty, but not the kind you frame and display, usually. 

Naturally doing these things can be a pleasure, but I don't think anyone would say that pleasure is the real purpose of doing them. Nor are they training for anything, other than more of the same practice. 

When I first heard about the "ways" I assumed they were intended to improve one's character somehow. I think this was my Western habit of seeing practices as worthwhile only if they were a kind of payment for a later reward. Now I think this is not the correct way to think about them.

Doing them is about... doing them. They are a kind of time set aside from regular life, in which one focusses one's mind and lives in the moment. Again, no one talks about the goal being pleasure, in the way that most hobbies or other pastimes might be. It would be strange to hear "You should try the tea ceremony, it's fun!" There might well be benefits in terms of calming a hectic day, but if you were to practice them as therapy that would also be too utilitarian, I think. 

(Similarly, the Zen practice of mindfulness has become a kind of therapy in America, but that isn't how Zen Buddhists think of it.) 

So I'd say that's a kind of category of action which is neither utilitarian nor pleasure-seeking. But still seems worth doing to me. 

I don't know if that's the kind of thing you were thinking about.

I've been meditating regularly for a very long time, and only just recently have I reaped the full benefits....I mean, the shit does work, but it takes so fucking long to become truly effective, that most Americans would definitely not be able to handle it, and would simply become distracted with some other form of escapism....