Feeling Pain and Pleasure

My body has taken a good bit of abuse recently, leading to experiencing pain in a variety of places.  Remodeling work takes a toll, from basic cuts and scratches on my hands, leading to wear gloves more, to banging my head enough times to prompt me to wear a helmet.  Spending three days doing plumbing and wiring in my attic was the worst, between the excessive heat, the fiberglass insulation getting everywhere, and maneuvers in tight spaces hurting my back.  Besides my gloves and helmet there where a variety of other pieces of gear I used to protect myself from pain, both immediately and in the future.  I had a respirator to protect my lungs from fiberglass, mold and asbestos, and goggles to protect my eyes and vision.

Regardless of all of those preparations, I have found myself in a lot of pain the last few days.  Pain is a strange phenomenon, in that it is a strongly negative sensation, contained entirely in our head.  It appears to come from other areas of our body, but in reality, it is just our brains giving us conscious warnings, based on signals it is receiving from those places.  Pain also doesn't need to have a physical source; it can be entirely emotional or spiritual.  One of the reasons the heart is associated with feelings, is that is the primary place people experience the sensation of pain, when their "wounds" are entirely emotional.

The actual sensation of pain is strange, in that it is hard to bear, even though it is just a feeling.  That is the whole reason it exists, as it provides the motivation for the reflex to protect our body.  Pain is usually perceived as a very bad thing, and while it is in a way, it serves an important warning system to prevent or minimize actual damage to our bodies.  Simple things like shifting our body weight are done subconsciously to avoid pain, but serve an important purpose.  Paralyzed people who have no feeling are not prompted to do that, and can wound themselves with there own bodies as a result.  Pain is a strongly negative sensation that serves as a motivation to action.

So that description of pain serves as a starting point for an examination of pleasure.  The concept of pleasure has been on my mind for a while, but I wasn't sure how to examine it in a post until I got the idea for this perspective:  Pain is the opposite of pleasure.  In the same way that certain things can feel "bad" to us, other things can feel "good" to us.  The broadest form I can think of is eating.  Eating can satisfy hunger, which can otherwise be a source of pain.  But eating can also be a true source of pleasure, based on flavor and texture.

Certain foods are more pleasurable to eat than others, depending on one's tastes. Frequently, it feels like the things that are the most pleasurable to eat, are the things that are the worst for our health.  Why would God set things up that way?  I believe that is an illusion in most cases, and that unless you are just eating Twinkies, most things are good for us in moderation.  It is only when that pleasure causes us to want to eat far too much of something, that it becomes unhealthy.  The other potential issue is eating far too much in general, but I suspect that lack of exercise probably plays a bigger role than excessive diet in most cases, at least in America, where the farthest anyone ever walks, is to their car.  Even fats and sugars are healthy for the human body, at least in limited quantities.  We would die without them.  They only get a bad reputation, because they tend to occupy a higher percentage of people's diets than they should.

The most extreme form of physical pleasure that I am aware of, is sexual pleasure.  Now this just as much "all in one's head" as pain is, if not more so.  But these sensations are strong enough to motivate people to do all sorts of crazy things, occasionally at great risk to themselves, in order to experience them.  And all for a "feeling" they experience for a few seconds, and then it is over.  There is no persistent result, requiring the experience to be repeated in order to feel it again.  The same is true for eating, which is what leads to that being a problem of excess for many people.

Pain on the other hand, is much more likely to be persistent, unless the source of the feeling is dealt with.  Imagine if pleasure operated more that way.  I don't know why it doesn't; maybe that is a result of the fall.  Life would probably be very different if pleasure was more frequently a persistent sensation.