The Three True Pleasures

Link to video version
The Three True Pleasures are so called because unlike the normal worldly pleasures they are unlimited and not subject to ever diminishing returns. Diminishing returns are one of the greatest sources of discontent and unhappiness as they turn our greatest joys into our greatest disappointments.

The first true pleasure is the pleasure of 'wholeness', or 'knowledge of your true indentity'. All humans suffer from identity problems as without the right guidance it is very hard to know who you really are. The way our minds work is to analyze by dissecting, separating and comparing and this is how we try to 'find ourselves'. The problem is that type of logic does not work when applied to identity. One may examine the threads that make up one's being endlessly without ever discovering any one that is more 'true self' than another. We are made of disparate parts, firstly the body and all it's physical attributes, secondly the mind, thoughts and cognitive perceptions and lastly the emotions, which are the reaction to that which we perceive. The body, mind and feelings are personal attributes but none of them are really the 'true self'.
The 'true self' is the cohesive power that binds all the personal attributes together and makes them into a distinct and unique entity - I call this the totality of the self. To know the totality of the self is not really difficult once you know what you are looking for, though developing the right kind of perceptive process requires some practice. Learn to be aware of your whole being and the space around you by half a meter. At first one must use imagination to envisage what the totality of the self 'might be like', but with practice imagination becomes 'feeling' in sense of tangible awareness. The analytic mind and the emotions must be suppressed or they will 'divide' consciousness into separate sensations. Once this has been mastered the feeling of 'wholeness' and identity is very pleasurable, making you feel comfortable and secure.

The second true pleasure is the pleasure of 'growth', of getting stronger, and expanding. This pleasure comes when you learn to 'ratchet' up the power of your consciousness by expanding and contracting the totality of the self. This is a pure natural pleasure  that grows in satisfaction as you grow, which in turn feeds your sense of wholeness and identity.

The third true pleasure is the joy of the perfect self image. The perfect self is the blue print for your being and is modeled on yourself in perfect young adulthood. The totality of the self is the overall cohesive power of your being and the perfect self image is the expression of the totality as a design for being.


We move naturally away from pain and toward pleasure and this instinctive movement must be harnessed to your consciousness evolution practice. Once you have experienced the joy of the three true pleasures it is easy to find them, in fact your body, mind and emotions will move to them on their own.

The reason why people mostly cannot see the true pleasures is because the nature of the senses is deceptive. The eyes don't lie, but they don't tell the whole truth either, and what we see is merely a small 'selection' of what it is possible to perceive. The ears are least honest of senses and we all know that we pick out what we' want to hear' from a babble of voices. The selective nature of senses is very useful in many ways , but it does not help us in the search for spiritual truth. It also means that we are dominated by physical reality; the popular notion of the 'real world'. Physical reality is inherently unstable and unreliable and relying on it is a fools game. Physicality is dominated by laws that are unchanging and it only by learning to perceive and utilize these unchanging laws that we can become masters of the physical world instead of what we are a  at present,  slaves.