Questioner (Q): Pranam Acharya Ji, please help me understand deeply the futility of chasing bodily pleasures. Looking back, my love for pleasures has always been above everything. There is the very strong feeling of pull, of missing out when I don’t act on my urges, which makes me act eventually. Gratitude.
Acharya Prashant (AP): Futility does not lie in chasing pleasures. Futility lies in chasing futile pleasures. Do your pleasures really succeed in pleasing you? It doesn’t look that way from your face. Have you ever been really pleased by anything? What kind of pleasures then you are talking of? Why call them pleasures, call them illusions. Being a pleasure seeker is your natural state. Man, for substantial reason has been called as a manifestation of joy. Have you seen all these Sanyasis from various orders, how they keep calling themselves as ‘Turiyānanda’, Ātmānanda, Brahmānanda, Kevalānanda? That is one thing common in their names. What? Ānanda. Have you ever wondered, why all of them, monks, necessarily have ‘Ānaṃda’ in their names? What they are saying is, “After everything, Ānaṃda”. It doesn’t matter what comes before. After everything, there remains ‘Ānaṃda’. So, it is ok, if you love pleasure. ‘Ānaṃda’ is something that you must love. It is the holiest thing to love.
It is an act of piousness being a pleasure seeker, but we are not pious people, why? Not because we seek pleasure, but because we hate pleasure. What is it to be a pleasure hater? It is to be a chaser of incomplete pleasure. Do not say that you are satisfied by momentary pleasures, say that you hate eternal pleasure and that is why you coolly settled down by momentary pleasures. Had you really been a lover of pleasure why would you make peace with these trivial things that you call as pleasurable? Some psychedelics, some drugs, some excitement, some women, some booze that is what your pleasure is? Right? High-speed driving, somehow managing a room in a posh hotel, walking into it with a girl, that is what your pleasure is. How does the bedsheet look after the night? How is the morning after the rampage? How does the bottle look? What does it give you the next day but the hangover? You call that pleasure? After five minutes of sex, you turn your back to her and start snoring and she starts farting, pleasure? Seriously? And after all the orgasmic heights you rush to the washroom and she hears the flutter of water in the commode. What pleasures are the two of you getting? And you come back and crash like a log and the next morning your mouth is stinking as hell. After all you have done with your mouth, pleasure? Broken beer bottles, pleasure? Merry made on somebody else’s money, pleasure?
