Fear is to desire is the same as what pleasure is to peace.
Your longing for peace is momentarily quelled by drinking the comforts of pleasure, no matter how destructive or toxic it is to your well-being.
Pleasure shares the same excitation, pulse and physiological symptoms with peace. It’s so much easier for human nature to succumb to pleasure because our global human experience of pleasure is far more popular and present in our day-to-day lives, where our unconscious festers. However, it’s far more fulfilling and meaningful to choose peace.
Accustomed as we are to quick solutions and on-demand services and products, our blindness to this technological era we live in has given way to a greater desire for peace that’s buried beneath the momentary bouts of pleasure we habitually indulge in.
Fear, pleasure and accepting our truth
In this context, I define pleasure as anything that’s used to create a sense of instant gratification and a feeling of comfort and relaxation. Although pleasure isn’t bad in itself, the widespread cause of fear creates an effect of a widespread indulgence of pleasure.
Take, for instance, the panic in people’s eyes and the hurried whispers after breaking news stories spread about a new coronavirus that was rapidly killing people. In just a few days, people’s lifestyles, relationships, careers and interests turned into an old, dusty Chevy pickup truck with an overloaded cargo box and bad transmission, speeding 200 miles on the highway—overwhelming, tumultuous, chaotic and crumbling. In other words, the pandemic appeared to be a recipe for a fatalistic disaster.
What did people do? Liquor store purchases skyrocketed during the pandemic, and so did divorce rates. The COVID-19 pandemic is a perfect example of what happens when people indulge their external fears. In cases like this, we become so absorbed by our fears that the only remedy seems to be to quickly absolve them by keeping our eyes closed—all for the temporary comfort and pleasure this provides. So long as we continually indulge our pleasures, then there will never be a need to fear, right?
Wrong. You might have heard the phrase, “If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck.” That’s just it. We only ever doubt ourselves (even when we’re clearly and obviously right) when we fear the truth. We don’t like the truth, so we find excuses for it, but the truth is the only road to peace. Learning to openly accept your flaws, your shadows, your tempting influences and your shameful weaknesses is the first step towards experiencing peace. To accept these things is to be humbled by your own humanity and appreciate its fragile, yet beautiful composition.
The reason ‘peaceful people’ can sometimes be perceived as boring is because those very same people making this judgment are addicted to pleasure hits. The concept of peacefulness seems like a grey, dead life to them. Yet, both pleasure and peace will produce the exact same serotonin boost in your body. Peace seems like a far-off road, and possibly an unworthy goal, but it more quickly shows up in your life when you practice truth.
They say that “practice makes perfect,” and we can grow peace in our lives simply and effectively by directly observing the truth of every situation and every single area of life. This extends to the parts of ourselves we dislike. In our current society, we’ve adopted the practice of numbing our wounds instead of healing them—as if this makes the shameful parts of us just disappear. Instead, these parts are only silenced.
Challenging the truth behind hurt and pain
Humans were born with a sensitive pain threshold that was designed and now operates in a way that ensures our survival. The only true purpose of survival, one might argue, is to have the opportunity to evolve as a species. If we take responsibility for this position, we can safely and logically assume that willfully shutting down our pain receptors (our ‘bad’ thoughts, feelings and behaviours) would naturally disrupt, delay or further destroy our ability to survive, and thus, evolve as a species.
In a way, choosing the easy route with quick boosts of whatever your dopamine high is will derail your basic universal purpose here on Earth, which is to survive and evolve. In order for us to evolve, we must accept pain, discomfort and hurt as essential to our collective and individual progress.
We must start cultivating peace by cultivating the acceptance of our true emotions. If you feel something in your gut or feel lonely and sad, allow yourself to courageously identify it.
When I first tried this a few years ago, I thought, “Wow, I feel incredibly stupid, small and afraid. I also feel rejected and completely unseen by my boyfriend.”
We need to dig deeper, with each truth that’s revealed. Let’s continue with this example.
“Why do I feel this way? I can only feel this way because he’s making me feel like that. But he never actually said any of those things. Why would I feel like this, then? Is it true that I’m stupid, small, etc.?”
This is where you further challenge the truth of the hurt and pain.
Continuing with my example, I tell myself: “Truthfully, I can’t be small or stupid because I know X, Y and Z… .” You understand where I’m going with this.
Afterward, you’ll likely recognize that your pain isn’t a result of the person or situation you’re interacting with. In my case, the pain I felt was a result of my own attachment to the need for external validation. This is where I kept going down the rabbit hole.
Many people say they wish things were fair, but they can’t handle it. They hide from it behind various temptations and secret pleasures.
When did this need for external validation start? Usually, it starts when someone makes you feel like you’re not good enough, or it’s there if you were left behind and experienced abandonment issues as a child—which I had. This creates an anxious attachment style that developed from traumas that have absolutely nothing to do with your present problem.
By unpacking the truth in every area of your life, you’ll naturally grow peaceful because you’ll understand where love was missing. Although the truth hurts, it doesn’t intend to harm you but to help restore fairness in the eyes of humanity. And the truth is, many people say they wish things were fair, but they can’t handle it. They hide from it behind various temptations and secret pleasures.
Living in truth means living in a state of peace that I claim feels just as euphoric as pleasure does, but in a different way. Peace is a way of being in your day-to-day life that buzzes around you like a bubble of electricity, eliciting sharpness, vitality and vigilance, as well as a hyper-awareness that vibrates through all your senses.
Peace isn’t a pursuit or the end goal in life, but a choice of direction in the face of uncertainty, confusion, pain, hurt and trauma. It’s the choice that helps us survive and evolve as a species, so it’s a good choice.
Two significant Tarot cards
An analogy I like to use to visualize the polar dynamic between pleasure and peace involves the major trump Tarot cards: The Lovers (VI) and The Devil (XV). The Lovers shows a well-known Christian biblical depiction of Archangel Michael, Eve, Adam and the Tree of Life, with the snake wrapped around the tree trunk. Adam is looking at Eve, who is portrayed naked in the image. She’s looking up at the Archangel, while the snake slithers beside her in the tree.
Interestingly, the Devil card depicts Baphomet, a grotesque Sabbatic horned goat who’s holding a torch pointing downward, inside a pitch-black cave. In front of him stand a female and a male with loose metal chains hanging around their necks, and these chains are attached to the Devil’s throne. The male is looking down at the female’s private parts, while the female is looking at the male.
Eve, in the Lovers card, is looking up at the Archangel. Her faith and devotion to love, which is the ultimate truth, is portrayed by her decision to focus and look up at Divinity (Archangel Michael) guiding her. She chooses to look up instead of being distracted by the snake, which is a representation of her own sexuality, her earthly temptations and her pleasure-seeking human self. The Lovers card, curiously enough, was once called The Choice.
Similarly, the naked male and female seen in the Devil card also have a choice, but one that’s not illumined by higher guidance or the Soul, as is the case with the Lovers. The choice within the Devil card lies between the pleasure of domination (male looking towards female’s private parts) and the pleasure of servitude (female looking at the male).
In the Devil Tarot card, the female can represent mental servitude to low self-worth, low self-esteem, a lack of self-love, and negative and untrue beliefs; she serves a false authority in her mind that’s influenced by external entities such as people, places or circumstances.
Contrarily, the female (Eve) in the Lovers chooses to direct her service and devotion to a greater power that benignly helps her serve the greatest good of all. Simultaneously, she serves her own greatest good by lifting her eyes to see a more loving, honest and true perspective of life.
The Lovers and the Devil Tarot cards provide an excellent depiction of how a person’s faith and devotion to peace (and in turn, truth) is the choice that can conquer the darkness of unconscious sloppiness, illusion, dull vibration and sensational coping mechanisms.
We can see that the two cards can be interpreted as the choice between servitude to pleasure or devotion to peace. Along the same lines, we can learn to recognize pleasure as a veiled desire for peace, and the road to peace is to ‘make peace’ with the truth. When we acknowledge the hard facts, we can judge people and situations more fairly, certainly and objectively.
In this way, choices are made wisely and with love because they’re carefully assessed, as opposed to being unconsciously enacted based on old patterns and behaviours that bleed onto current relationships and events in our lives. The people and situations in your present life are often at no fault and shouldn’t be held hostage to the pains and traumas of your past.
Honouring both pleasure and peace
The benefit of understanding this choice between pleasure and peace will give you the opportunity to exercise your free will and choose a life of peace, even if getting past the ‘truth part’ might be difficult and a hard pill to swallow. Remember that your pain is necessary to your survival and development. It’s our collective duty to honour this pilgrimage by doing our part to create progress on Earth, whatever that may look like and wherever it may lead us.
It’s noteworthy that I’m not discounting pleasure as ‘bad’ or unnecessary. Quite the contrary. If my excess overeating of chocolate makes me gain a higher percentage of fat, I surely won’t eat as much as I have been, but you bet I’ll have some every day if I can! Why would I, you ask, if the truth is that it isn’t good for my health? Well, another truth is that I’m more at peace if I experience the pleasure and joy of continuing to eat chocolate, even if that means in smaller doses.
Pleasure is necessary to the instinctual side of us, which also has needs that we can’t truthfully ignore. My wish is that you gain a better understanding of pleasure and peace separately, and also understand how they act as relational mirrors to one another. We must remember that our excess pleasures point to where we’re not seeing our truth, and therefore, aren’t at peace with something or someone in our lives.
We can’t have peace without pleasure, so we must honour both and learn the lessons of their intimate relationship so we can more lovingly integrate peace into our lives. Doing so will allow us to cultivate authentic love and harmonious, fair relationships with one another. This, perhaps, is a future vision of our development that we’ve been called to bravely step into today.
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image 1: Skitterphoto; image 2: WOKANDAPIX; image 3: Virgo Gem; image 4: giftedMG
