Let body and mind operate freely without you || Acharya Prashant (2016)

Listener 1: Pleasure for the human condition is just an absence of pain.

Acharya Prashant: Never talk of pleasure and pain separately. Never think that one exists in the absence of other. Never say that pleasure is the absence of pain. In fact, language has played a nasty trick here, by having two separate words for pleasure and pain. There must be one single word which is pleasure-pain, so that you know that these two are inexorably tied together, so that you know that one is the other, so that you know that what appears like a duality is just a mirage.

Freedom from pain is not an absence of pain; freedom of pain is letting pleasure-pain do their stuff and not being involved with that. By hopping to the other end of duality you do not get freedom from duality.

Moving to pleasure does not mean an end of pain or an absence of pain. *It only means that you are still on the same pleasure-pain axis.*

Maybe, in your imaginations, your location has shifted but shifted on the same axis. Freedom from pain is freedom from pleasure. And that means not the end of pain or pleasure or both. It means that now, you have complete freedom to have pleasure, to have pain, to let pleasure and pain play their own game.