I mentioned yesterday in my posting on how unchanging sensations fade away how barefooting opens up an entire new world of sensation. A legitimate question to ask is, “is that a good thing?”
That’s a much more loaded question than it might seem at first blush, I think.
It’s true, when you’re running or walking barefoot, sometimes the sensations are pleasurable, sometimes they’re uncomfortable, once in a while they’re painful, usually they’re neutral. But overall, it's cool to feel the world in a way that, biologically, we may well be programmed to. It reminds me of Oliver Sacks’s great book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, which had a chapter (#18) about a guy who all of a sudden found that he had a totally intense sense of smell, like a dog. He could walk into a room and recognize, before seeing them, the 20 people who had been there before. He could smell people’s emotions – fear, happiness, sexual arousal – and easily find his way around New York by smell alone.
Smell pleasure was intense – smell displeasure too – but it seemed to him less a world of mere pleasure and displeasure than a whole aesthetic, a whole judgment, a whole new significance, which surrounded him. (p. 157)
Maybe barefooting is kind of like that. One thing Sacks writes that is not so favorable about this comparison, is that when the guy was experiencing the world like a dog, he felt that the overwhelming sensory world that he was part of was actually crowding out his higher faculties of abstract reasoning and so forth. But I suspect barefooting is a far, far milder version of our primordial sensory possibilities than what this guy got a glimpse of. After a few weeks the experience suddenly ended for him. Sacks speculates that what happened was that an entire layer of our sensory experience, which has been pushed to the back of human consciousness by higher functions, temporarily came back to the fore for this man.
So are we better off exposing ourselves to the pleasures and the pains of barefoot sensation, or keeping our feet inside shoes where all sensation quickly fades?
Seems to me this question gets to the differences between two entire approaches to life. The Romantic viewpoint is that “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” (that’s Tennyson, the Internet tells me). That without sensation and deep feelings and experiences, even if that means deep pain, you are simply not living. The other point of view, which I no doubt simplistically think of as Asian (Buddhist, Taoist??), is that we should above all seek equanimity. The Tao Te Ching says that "What the master desires is non-desire."
I’ve always suspected that the pleasure centers of our brains are constructed in such a way that the amount of pleasure and the amount of pain we feel roughly balances out – that pleasure is like a wave in a pond: by attaining pleasure you gather the water up into a wave that will crest above the baseline – but that also simultaneously creates troughs that bring you below it. I wonder if this is why drug addiction, along with the intense pleasures it brings (the high from heroin is supposedly akin to an hours-long orgasm) brings so much misery. Why people whose lives are difficult and dreary find outlet in ecstatic religious ceremonies. Why teenagers who discover exciting new worlds with their peers become sullen and miserable at home. Why monks find contentment through self-flagellation. Why, I sometimes speculate, running and other tough athletic workouts raise your happiness level because they put you through painful experiences in a controlled and healthy way – driving out the pain intensely and leaving you with a gentle pleasure that suffuses the rest of your hours.
Western culture is based upon the romantic idea of seeking the high crests of waves, even though that may necessitate equally low troughs. For example, the cult of romantic love that emerged in the middle ages, is a socially constructed way of repressing sexual and romantic entanglements in order to build up desire to tremendous heights, until its attainment becomes a hugely joyous happening – but when thwarted or ruined, brings great sadness. ("If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it” – Hemingway.) Someone else I once read pointed out that the problem with the ideal of romantic love and “following one’s heart,” is that as soon as your heart changes course, if you take that seriously, why wouldn't you follow that heart right back out the door? Which leads to (let us settle upon a term that does not beg our question here) rocky relationships.
Advertising – in fact, arguably our whole post-Calvinist economy – is also based on urging people to seek peak sensations.
Many traditional non-European cultures, on the other hand, are based on arranged marriages where romantic love plays little role. Whether romantic love is a “natural” and omnipresent phenomenon in human cultures, as we westerners find it hard not to believe, I simply do not know. But either way it seems clear to me that it can be culturally built up and intensified and shaped into the center of personal and public life, or culturally treated as an anti-social nuisance that mature people resist and overcome just as they are expected to resist other anti-social sexual urges such as groping the chief’s wife.
Buddhism is all about extinguishing desire, not carefully cultivating it, by my understanding.
I argued yesterday that happiness and unhappiness are very relative, and basically define each other: unhappiness is the absence of happiness, and vice versa. The Ying and the Yang, inseparable. I guess
what I’m speculating about here is whether there is not also a brain-chemical dimension to this – that
every high brings a hangover, of one kind or another. On the other hand, I also speculated yesterday that the overall arc of one’s life could mean greater or lesser happiness, and obviously human life is exceedingly complicated and some people are way more happy than others for a million reasons. But still, trying to grasp some basic underlying dynamics here.
So what’s the path to a happy life? Does one seek sensations, even though that might guarantee a dose of pain/unhappiness along with the pleasure/happiness? Or is the wise course to seek the equanimity of calm seas? I haven’t the foggiest idea. I make no pretense to knowing whether one or the other orientation might be generally better. We have to find our own paths. And, in our own footwear.
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