Redeeming Pleasure through Hinduism and Buddhism

Western culture has never quite known what to do with pleasure. We tolerate it, market it, even celebrate it in the abstract—but we rarely take it seriously. Pleasure is seen as secondary, indulgent, or morally suspect. “Hedonism” still carries a sting. But this is beginning to change.

We are now living through what I see as a second sexual revolution. The first, in the 1960s and ’70s, was about breaking free from repression. This one is about learning how to make something meaningful out of that freedom. It’s about how to feel, how to relate, how to heal. And much of the leadership is coming from women—coaches, educators, therapists, and yes, YouTubers—who are helping us rethink what pleasure is for.

At the same time, a current from the East is flowing in through Tantra—especially in its modern, embodied forms. Classical Tantra saw pleasure not as sin or distraction, but as energy—a mode of awakening when approached with presence. Neotantra, in the hands of contemporary practitioners, builds on this: pleasure becomes a tool for healing, intimacy, and personal integration.

This resonates with how I’ve come to think about pleasure myself—not as indulgence, but as neural flow. Pleasure is what happens when things move smoothly. Anxiety is when they jam. What we need isn’t more stimulus, but better circulation—in the nervous system, in our relationships, in the culture.

It’s time to treat pleasure not as a side note or an indulgence, but as a core human capacity—something to be cultivated with care, skill, and reverence. That’s the work of redemption. And it’s already underway. 

Note: ChatGPT did the image at the head of this article. 

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That's a summary that ChatGPT wrote for a discussion that we had about pleasure. I'm appending that complete conversation. Pay particular attention to the discussion of pleasure and energy. Following my usual convention, my prompts are set in boldface. 

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Pleasure in Hinduism and Buddhism

Pleasure is somewhat suspect in the West. At best it’s tolerated as a secondary “good.” But it’s also highly suspect. “Hedonism” has negative connotations. I’m interested in pleasure in the context of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. I realize that those are rich traditions. I’m after a first impression, a starting point.

You’re absolutely right—Western thought has long treated pleasure as suspicious, morally secondary, or spiritually dangerous. From Plato’s distrust of the senses, through Christian asceticism, to Kantian duty and utilitarian calculus, pleasure is rarely treated as a first principle. Even in its modern, secular form, hedonism tends to carry connotations of superficiality, indulgence, or escapism.

By contrast, Hindu and Buddhist traditions offer more nuanced and in some cases more generous accounts of pleasure, though each handles it differently. Here’s a first impression—a conceptual starting point rather than a comprehensive treatment:

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🕉️ Hinduism: Pleasure as One of Life’s Legitimate Aims

Hindu thought classically recognizes four aims of human life, called the puruṣārthas:

1. Dharma – righteousness, duty, moral order
2. Artha – material success, wealth, power
3. Kāma – pleasure, desire, aesthetic enjoyment
4. Moksha – liberation from the cycle of birth and death

Kāma:

• Is not merely tolerated—it is affirmed as one of the valid goals of life.
• Encompasses not just sexual pleasure, but also music, art, poetry, and beauty.
• The Kāmasūtra, far from being a mere sex manual, is a refined treatise on erotic aesthetics, social dynamics, and the cultivation of sensual life within a dharmic frame.

Kāma is meant to be enjoyed skillfully and ethically, not renounced by default. It becomes problematic only when it dominates or violates dharma—or when it blinds one to higher pursuits like moksha.

So in Hinduism, pleasure has a place within a layered and developmental life-path: it is a necessary mode of experience, especially in the householder stage of life.

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☸️ Buddhism: The Middle Way and the Transformation of Desire

Buddhism begins with a diagnosis of suffering (dukkha), caused by craving (taṇhā). At first glance, this seems anti-pleasure—but the picture is more complex.

Key Points:

• The Buddha rejected self-denial as harshly as he rejected self-indulgence. His path is the Middle Way.
• Pleasure in itself is not evil or defiling. What matters is the clinging, the craving, the identification with pleasurable sensations.

In practice:

• Ordinary sensual pleasure (kāma-sukha) is seen as impermanent and not a reliable basis for happiness.
• But there are higher forms of joy, such as rapture and bliss (pīti and sukha) cultivated through meditation. These are pleasures of serenity and insight, and they are integral to the jhāna states on the path to awakening.

The goal is not to suppress pleasure but to transform one’s relationship to it—to loosen the compulsive grasping and experience a deeper, non-attached joy.

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🧩 First Contrast:

Aspect	Hinduism (especially in the Gṛhastha stage)	Buddhism (especially early Theravāda)
Pleasure seen as	A valid goal (kāma), when guided by dharma	A source of suffering if clung to
Practice involves	Skillfully enjoying art, sex, beauty	Cultivating inner joy without attachment
Final aim	Integrate kāma on the path to moksha	Transcend craving for pleasure entirely

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🧘 First impression, then:

In Hinduism, pleasure is a power to be honored and integrated.
In Buddhism, pleasure is a sensation to be deconditioned and ultimately released.

Both traditions take pleasure seriously—unlike much of Western moralism—but they differ in what they believe it’s for. Hinduism might say: learn to love well. Buddhism might say: learn to let go, even of love.

Would you like to follow up by looking at Tantra’s view of pleasure? Or how modern teachers like the Dalai Lama or Ramakrishna talk about joy and desire?

Mind Regulation in the 4th Arena

I’ve been thinking and writing a bit on the theme of a coming Fourth Arena, where the First Arena is the world of inanimate matter, the Second is the world of life, and the Third is the world of culture. What’s the Fourth about? I don’t know.

But I’m thinking it has something to do with mind. I figure mind arose in the universe in the Second Arena. Just where in the Second Arena (hereafter A2), I don’t know. I doubt that it makes sense to ascribe minds to bacteria. To insects maybe? Not likely. Vertebrates, sure, somewhere among the vertebrates. I’m not sure where, but it doesn’t matter now.

But with A3, mind can elaborate itself through culture. What’s next beyond culture? Not sure, and not sure where this is beginning.

What I’m thinking about is mind-regulation and, in particular, mind-regulation in conjunction with “intelligent” computers. If we’re going to be working more closely with a variety of computers, what’s that imply about mind-regulation? Here I’m not thinking about Musk-style physical linkage between brains and computers, though – who knows? – we may well have that for non-therapeutic purposes, for mind-augmentation or whatever. 

What if I set out to deliberately alter my mood through interacting with ChatGPT? 

At the moment I’m thinking more along the lines of my various interactions with ChatGPT. For the most part they just same-old same-old; nothing happening. Every once in a while, however something special happens, and I’m delighted, laughing to beat the band. I’m thinking, in particular, about moments during the sessions in which I created the story of the OpenWHALE, whaling ship of between two worlds, of the Jolly Green Giant chronicles. I didn’t create those things for the purpose of provoking laughter in myself, or in anyone else. But what if I did? What if I set out to deliberately alter my mood thought interacting with ChatGPT?

That’s the kind of thing I have in mind. We do all kinds of things to alter our mood. We take drugs of various sorts. Meditation. Bio-feedback. We go to movies, listen to music, read books, and so forth. We may do those things for entertainment, but they also change our mood – and isn’t entertainment itself mood-changin?

I’m thinking of other things as well. Writing sometimes comes easily to me, other times it comes hard. Sometimes I avoid it, put it off, for reasons I don’t understand – I’m doing that right now with my report on last year’s work with ChatGPT. Would interaction with a computer assistant help me over the hump? Could we create computer assistants that come to know our moods and adjust themselves accordingly? Is that what virtual reality is for?

I don’t know. I’m thinking about it. 

What about computers and the flow states they enable?

Rick Beato interviews the great Keith Jarrett

Beato's notes:

Keith Jarrett is an American jazz pianist and composer born in Allentown, Pennsylvania in 1945. He is considered one of the most influential and accomplished jazz musicians of his generation, having recorded dozens of albums as a solo artist and as a leader of various ensembles. Known for his virtuosic piano playing and improvisational skills, Jarrett has been recognized for his unique ability to blend elements of jazz, classical music, and world music into his compositions. He has collaborated with many of the world's top musicians and has received numerous awards throughout his career, cementing his place in the pantheon of jazz greats.

This is my interview with Keith Jarrett.

Special thanks to: Pat Ryan, Keith Williams, David Bendeth, Steve Cloud, Caroline Fontanieu, Martin Geyer, ECM Records and very special thanks to Akiko Jarrett.

It's all good, but pay particular attention to the section where Beato plays Jarrett a solo improvisation on Miles Davis's "Solar" that Jarrett had done in the 1980s. From that point to the end of the interview is superb. Excellent music – there's another piece of music after than. And an important document in music history.

Beato introduces that segment at about 31:01. Beato juxtaposes video of Jarrett listening NOW with video of Jarrett's playing THEN. The performance is masterful and entrancing. Notice how Jarrett played the piano with his whole body, often rising up from the piano bench and dancing at the keyboard – something he can no longer do as a consequence of strokes he suffered in 2018. Watch Jarrett's face as he listens.

Beato: That's riding the wave.

Jarrett: Wow, that's great.

Beato: That is really just amazing. It just all flow. Nothing is, is anything even going through your mind when you're playing. You're just channeling, right?

Jarrett: Yeah.

From the Wikipedia:

Jarrett's race has been a source of commentary by media and activists throughout his career, as he has reported being recurrently mistaken as a Black person. In a 2000 interview with Terry Gross, Jarrett relates an incident at the Heidelberg Jazz Festival in the Rhine-Neckar region of Germany when he was protested by Black musicians for something akin to cultural appropriation. He also tells of a separate moment in his career when black jazz musician Ornette Coleman approached him backstage, and "said something like 'Man, you've got to be black. You just have to be black.'" Jarrett replied "I know. I know. I'm working on it."

Me too, me too.

Check out my collection of anecdotes, Emotion and Magic in Musical Performance, Version 11.

In flow with DALL-E

Bakz T. Future, Confession: DALL-E 2's New Quotas Make it Hard to Get Into a Creative Flow State, Multimodal, 19 July 2022.

The opening:

When I first got access to DALL-E, it was not only an amazing life experience but since I got in early (thank you again OpenAI team), I was given access to the tool in a pretty much unlimited capacity. This meant, specifically, I would receive 9 image results at a time, unlimited prompt lookups, unlimited variations, and unlimited edits/inpainting. I am still grateful for the opportunity.

What I immediately found was that after several prompt lookups in the platform, I not only developed an intuition for the model’s capabilities, but I felt my imagination and a space of possibilities growing faster and wider than ever before around me. I was constantly thinking of prompt ideas and had several lists going at the same time, exploring all of them as fast as I could type!

But then OpenAI placed restrictions on use, limiting prompts to 50/day. Crash, it seems that many of his favorite renders

… and I realized they were all the result of so many later stage prompts which I entered into DALL-E. They were outputted very well past the 50 prompt per day limit. At some point, you are so deep into prompt lookups and iterating so fast, you can’t necessarily even trace back how you got to where you are. You’re rapidly exploring new territory, iterating on prompts/ideas quickly, and at the upper limits of your imagination and mental visualization abilities. All of these above images were not what I had initially set out to make when I started entering prompts into DALL-E, but through a longer process of iteration and discovery, I was able to discover them. What I believe is my best and most original work which I also enjoyed making the most.

However, since the quota, I have not been able to reach this important state of mind. At first, I struggled to find an adequate word for this stage, but then I realized it already exists for other creative disciplines - artists, musicians, programmers, writers, all describe the importance of reaching some kind of “flow state” where they can work at their peak creative levels.

YES.

Is there an equivalent state for the AI engines themselves? What would the mechanism be? In the case of humans one can imagine a tuning of the nervous system through recruiting more neurons to the task and a shift in neuro-chemical concentration. What would be the equivalent in an AI model?

What is (musical) pleasure? [Csikszentmihalyi's flow]

I had to confront that question when writing my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil (2001). Ever since the late 1950s there has been talk about “pleasure centers in the brain.” If that talk is valid, then pleasure is simply the stimulation of those centers. There are problems with that view, however, and I found myself forced to a more subtle conception. Here it is, in a section entitled “The Pleasures of Music: Inner Motion” (pp. 82-86):

The most important aspect of our subjective musical experience is, I believe, pleasure. Why is it a pleasure to make, dance, and to listen to music? I am as curious about ordinary musical pleasure as about altered musical states. Music can be quite compelling and pleasurable even if you don’t enter into some heightened state of awareness and self loss.

If you had read, or heard about, pleasure centers in the brain, you might suggest that music stimulates one or more of those centers. This is presumably what Stephen Pinker had in mind when he asserted that “Music appears to be a pure pleasure technology, a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest though the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once” in his recent book How the Mind Works. The reasoning is obvious:

1. The brain has pleasure circuits.
2. Music is pleasurable.
3. Therefore music stimulates the brain’s pleasure circuits.

Problems arise, however, when we start searching for the pleasure circuits music stimulates.

The first so-called pleasure centers were discovered, quite by accident, in the mind-1950s by James Olds and Peter Milner. Crudely put, they found that there were small areas in the core of the rat’s brain that seemed to give the rat pleasure when they were electrically stimulated. But that formulation—“give the rat pleasure”—presumes a nonexistent intimacy with the rat’s subjective state. What they observed is that if a rat could stimulate one of these areas simply by pressing a bar, it would do so, time after time after time, for hours. That was taken to indicate that the stimulation is pleasurable. But of course, we couldn’t ask the rats whether they were experiencing pleasure. Some surgeons did implant such electrodes into patients who were suffering from epilepsy, in the hope that they could afford their patients some relief. The result, suggests Walter Freeman [neurobiologist at Berkeley], does not sound much like the delirious pleasure Pinker suggested:

In different places they reported feeling pleasure, sometimes sexual, but mostly rather bland. Some other patients, who were afflicted with chronic pain, reported that they got temporary relief from their suffering. They were given the opportunity to go home with a battery and a switch, so that they could treat their own pain by stimulating themselves and adjusting their own dosage of electric current.

But no one wanted to keep the wires. Some doctors feared that a black market might grow, with pleasure addicts going to third world countries to get implanted with wires and stimulators. That didn't happen, because whatever the pleasure is, it doesn't last, and it isn't happiness.

These so-called pleasure centers are involved in regulating appetitive behaviors such as eating and drinking. Karl Pribram has argued that self-stimulation has the effect of tricking the animal into thinking it has satisfied one of these desires. Pribram thus suggests that “the self-stimulation process would be something like repeatedly adjusting and returning to its original location the setting device on a home thermostat in a room that is already warm. The furnace turns on briefly, only to go off again as the setting is returned to its baseline.” The pleasure is thus not some generalized pleasure, but the virtual satisfaction of a virtual need.

More recently Jaak Panksepp has noted self-stimulating animals “did not have the behaviorally settled outward appearance of animals consuming conventional rewards. Self stimulating animals look excessively excited, even crazed, when they work for this kind of stimulation.” They look like they are exploring and investigating, not basking in the enjoyment of needs well-satisfied. Panksepp believes these neural centers are components of an exploratory system.

If these “classical” pleasure centers aren’t really pleasure centers, maybe we have to look elsewhere. Panksepp, for example, does look elsewhere, to the homeostatic systems that directly regulate the body’s energy balance by attending to such things as thirst, hunger, and temperature. Perhaps the centers regulating these variables yield pleasure when the variable reaches the desired level. Thus Panksepp asserts that “most of our feelings of sensory pleasure pleasure arise from the various stimuli that signal the return of bodily imbalances toward an optimal level of functioning.” But what does that have to do with music? Are we to believe that music provides virtual satisfaction for virtual thirst?

The notion of “pleasure circuits” thus begins to unravel as soon as one examines it. It isn’t clear just what these circuits are or how and why music might affect them. Still, I have no a priori reason to deny the existence of specific pleasure circuits accessible to music. Who knows, maybe we will discover them. But I would like to suggest that there is a different way to think about pleasure. The “pleasure circuits” view of pleasure asserts the existence of centers which monitor certain variables. When the variable assumes the desired value—you’ve consumed enough water, you are no longer cold, whatever—the center detects that desired result and signals “We’ve got it.” That signal is experienced as pleasure.

There is, however, another kind of pleasure. John Jerome was interested in the pleasures of athletic excellence and proposed an informal theory about what he calls the Sweet Spot Theory of Performance. By sweet spot he means that spot on a baseball bat, tennis racket, or golf club that affords the squarest contact with the ball, transfers energy to it most efficiently, and thus minimizes jarring transmitted back to the hands. That spot, he assures us, is not myth but a mechanical fact. Generalizing from that, he argues that the superior athlete “is the one who in effect reaches the sweet spot of the arc for each segment of his or her skeleton as he or she goes through the athletic motion.” The pleasure of sport—at any rate, the pleasure that derives from the activity itself, rather than from beating someone else in competition—is simply the feeling one gets when the body is working at its best.

The pleasure of music, I submit, is like that. Musicians certainly know the kind of physical pleasure that Jerome talks about, as do dancers. But so do people who only listen.

Jerome is focused on the smoothly functioning athletic body. But muscles cannot contract and flex in just the right way unless the nervous system controls them just so. The smooth motion is in the body, but the pleasure is in the nervous system. Even if a listener does not move his body, his nervous system does have to follow the sound. I am suggesting that a great deal of the pleasure we take from music lies in overall dynamic character of the activity itself—it is a property of the neural weather. Some weather feels better than other weather. This is not a matter of some brain center detecting some property in the neural weather and signaling good or bad. Rather, we are talking about the overall state of the brain. You don’t need to detect this state because this state is you; it is your mind.

We are now in familiar territory. The idea that music is linked to motion is an old one, one explored by Charles Keil in his essay “Motion and Feeling through Music” and validated by studies that show activity in motor areas of the brain when people are listening to music. Musical pleasure is an example of flow, a term coined by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow is not special either to music or athletic performance, but is a capacity inherent in the nervous system and can happen during a wide range of activities. In Csikszentmihalyi’s model, flow is a function of the conditions of task performance. Where one’s skill exceeds the demands of a task by a considerable margin, the task is boring. Where task demands exceed one’s skill by a considerable margin, the task provokes anxiety—which we’ll examine in more detail in the next section. One feels flow only when the task demands are just a little beyond one’s current skill. In that situation one must be fully alert and attentive in order to perform the task and, if one is so, then it is possible to perform the task well. Thus flow represents a style of action, not some specific set of activities.

The idea of musical pleasure as flow does not preclude the possibility that music stimulates specific “pleasure centers.” Any such centers that are activated through music will contribute to that music’s pleasure. But musical pleasure does not depend on such centers. In general I would expect that music is pleasurable in proportion to its capacity for exercising the inherent properties of the brain, especially the rhythmic properties. Thus:

Pleasure as Coherence: Musical pleasure is the subjective awareness of overall neural flow where that flow is well-timed and coherent.

Further, this musical flow is not under the control of any particular brain system but reflects the joint interaction of all active neural systems, at all levels of interaction. The pleasure-center view would have us believe that musical flow is regulated by those specific pleasure centers. If musical pleasure is not localized in a few centers, it follows that musical flow is not regulated by those centers. We have mutual adjustment and interaction here and there, indeed everywhere, but no omniscient master dictating the terms of the neural dance. Music’s pleasures have no master.

Unthinking (the Economist has gone Zen)

Ian Leslie, Non Cogito, Ergo Sum, The Economist, May/June 2012:

Unthinking is the ability to apply years of learning at the crucial moment by removing your thinking self from the equation. Its power is not confined to sport: actors and musicians know about it too, and are apt to say that their best work happens in a kind of trance. Thinking too much can kill not just physical performance but mental inspiration. Bob Dylan, wistfully recalling his youthful ability to write songs without even trying, described the making of “Like a Rolling Stone” as a “piece of vomit, 20 pages long”. It hasn’t stopped the song being voted the best of all time.

In less dramatic ways the same principle applies to all of us. A fundamental paradox of human psychology is that thinking can be bad for us. When we follow our own thoughts too closely, we can lose our bearings, as our inner chatter drowns out common sense. A study of shopping behaviour found that the less information people were given about a brand of jam, the better the choice they made. When offered details of ingredients, they got befuddled by their options and ended up choosing a jam they didn’t like. [...]

Researchers from Columbia Business School, New York, conducted an experiment in which people were asked to predict outcomes across a range of fields, from politics to the weather to the winner of “American Idol”. They found that those who placed high trust in their feelings made better predictions than those who didn’t. The result only applied, however, when the participants had some prior knowledge.

This last point is vital. Unthinking is not the same as ignorance; you can’t unthink if you haven’t already thought. Djokovic was able to pull off his wonder shot because he had played a thousand variations on it in previous matches and practice; Dylan’s lyrical outpourings drew on his immersion in folk songs, French poetry and American legends. The unconscious minds of great artists and sportsmen are like dense rainforests, which send up spores of inspiration.

See also Flow (Mihály Csíkszentmihályi).

H/t 3QD.