Of kamma-vipaka, there will be suffering, there is suffering, and there had been the suffered, and these are unnecessary. Pleasure rings like the chime on a doorbell. Of metaphor, concepts illuminate like lights on a switchboard. Of these, it was thought, “ok amygdala, the loop can shut down now”.
“Oh doctor, I do wish you’d tell me directly that what I’m doing is right…”
“This might seem obtuse, but I suppose that’s a call for help…”
When Sensei shared that “nobody understands you,” and followed with, “I know, because they don’t understand me,” the wish to be understood dissolved. The cracks appeared then, and began a dissolution process. Please do not mistake it with apathy, for it is beyond apathy and flow. Yet it also may be mistaken for doing what pleases “you”. Yet this altogether is not motivating, something akin to the bodhisattva vow is motivating, yet it may be the opinion and conjecture, and minimally evidenced by anecdote, that this bodhisattva vow is pleasing.
The literature review on psychophysiological aspects of altruism may assure the reader that pleasure is not necessarily an exclusive motivating phenomena, though that is a prevailing perspective of Indo-European imperial-colonialist male dominant ethnocentric cultures. It’s not as if altruism and pleasure principles are the only motivating phenomena. There is also plain ‘seeking behavior’ wherein pleasure is a reinforcement contingency rather than a motivating fact. The motivation to ‘seek’ seems more akin to the ‘wish to be’ which is very similar and congruent to ‘attachment to becoming’.
Sometimes medicine is bitter, sometimes it is sweet, sometimes it is salty, sometimes it is sour, and sometimes it is umami! There are such medicines that are a combination of these, in different proportions, and in different temporal proportions of proportions in its delivery. Much to the songwriter’s benefit of “Spoonful of Sugar”, it was the sugar, as medicine, that was the treatment for the revulsivity to bitterness, on its way down. As much as there is a reaction to bitter tastes, there are reactions to bitter language, coated in linguistic and syntactic sugar. At some point, however, the production of this sugar is seen to enslave a great many, and to put the pedal to the proverbial metal, as is the urgency of the matter entire, this sugar consumption is overheating the entire planet.
Thankfully the correction is in process.