I don't think so. Suppose you are being held in solitary confinement. Then suppose you are being tortured on top of that. When the torture stops, you are getting repsite from pain, but you aren't getting any pleasure. The mind can go haywire whilst seeking pleasure - my point in fact. You haven't addressed the difference between normal and abnormal seeking for pleasure. The drive for food can result in gluttony. The drive for sex can result in (unreproductive) perversion. The drive for pleasure can result in (destructive) addiction to drugs, alcohol, pain, etc.. The drive for pleasure can result inantiscocial behaviour, selfishness, greed, etc.
When finally we settle into the still waters of our not so distant future, we will be afforded--like it or not--the time to reflect upon what did motivate us, what motivates us presently, and whether or not the passage of time has created any appreciable difference between past and present motivations. When we were young, we were motivated by candy. There was tongue candy, eye candy, ear candy, and thought candy. Has the candy changed? If so, how has the candy changed? Have you increased the quantity of your candy, or have you increased the quality of it?
Of course your getting pleasure, your dead happy the torture has stopped. Within us all is a normal desire for pleasure, at the level of our essence, and this desire is for pleasure in the spiritual. on top of that at our corporeal level this root desire is mirrored into countless varying desires for pleasure where ever we can get it, but all these desires are a reflection of a part that is hidden deep within, the "I", a desire for spiritual pleasure. Its these mirrored desires which can become abnormal through physiological and psychological reasons. How our parents fed us when we were babies and what they fed us is going to affect our eating habits. Some sort of trauma can affect our psychology and induce us to eat excessively as some sort of comfort. An overactive sex drive could be the result of hormonal imbalance or a psychological need to be loved. Then there is this reason, that inner desire for pleasure, the soul which is hidden, starts crying out to be heard. We havn't found our soul yet so we see its corporeal mirror and feel an increasing need for physical pleasure, unproductive perversion seems a simple answer to this increasing need for pleasure but its far from satisfying that inner need of the soul to be recognised, this causes us to seek ever new ways to find satisfaction, leading to many really black perversions. Eventually we recognise that this quest for external pleasure is not fulfilling our needs and we turn within towards the soul and find the hidden pearl. Again, life is just one quest for pleasure, firstly in the corporeal and then in the spiritual. It seems to me that those who are perveted, if its not caused by psychological or phsyiological reasons are just one step away from entering a quest for the spiritual, but first they need to explore their darker side.
Nice post Glenn First the quantity till it makes us sick, then we realise we had better change the quality.
