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Ha ha ha, outstanding!!!
(Your recent post about vaping ++ likewise comes to mind!)
(It's funny, both the reference, and also the broader context. But for all that it's true enough. My comment's entirely literal, and not meant sarcastically, or even ironically. Having both the circumstances and the leisure for a bubble bath with champagne -- both metaphorically and literally ; and that regularly and consistently ; and most importantly the frame of mind as well as the depth of mind that lets one fully soak that in and also to rest content at that, metaphorically as well as literally ; arguably that's as wise a definition as well as recipe for thar elusive fata morgana everyone spends their life chasing : happiness.)
The wise ass is wise indeed!
Posted by: Appreciative Reader | March 12, 2022 at 01:31 PM
Ah sensual pleasures...
And all the harm people do to others and themselves to have them...
Posted by: Spence Tepper | March 12, 2022 at 03:02 PM
Waste not your Hour, nor in the vain pursuit
Of This and That endeavor and dispute;
Better be merry with the fruitful Grape
That openeth the Door of the Heart
Than sadden after none, or bitter, fruit.
--Omar Khayyam
[There's one apocryphal line but your mission today is to find
and explain it. This message will self-destruct in ten seconds.]
Posted by: Dungeness | March 12, 2022 at 05:39 PM
The fruit that leads to compassion towards others opens the heart.
The fruit that feeds our desire is bitter for it ends in inevitable loss.
Posted by: Spence Tepper is a | March 12, 2022 at 06:13 PM
@ Spence [The fruit that leads to compassion towards others opens the heart...]
Well said IMHO and well before mission deadline!
Posted by: Dungeness | March 12, 2022 at 07:16 PM
I don't think the message, couched within that joke, is so much an advocacy for sensual pleasures, as for fully appreciating the simple pleasures of life.
Taking a long soak hurts no one. It would be wrong to fixate on the bathtub; and totally dysfunctional to take to desperate measures to procure one if one isn't possessed of the circumstances where one might be effortlessly available. It doesn't have to be a bathtub, it could well be sex with your partner, or looking out at the view from your window, or taking pleasure in your garden, or simply reading a good book.
This isn't about "sensualism" at all. At least that's my reading of it.
(That still lets the window open a crack, to let in the Buddhistic critique. But "harm" of the kind you mention, probably doesn't enter into the message here.)
Posted by: Appreciative Reader | March 13, 2022 at 08:09 AM
Yes, why not have a bath and some wine. After all, our minds are the chief sources of desire and as we revel in mind stuff constantly, there's always room for a few more desires.
Posted by: Ron E. | March 13, 2022 at 09:45 AM
Result!
Stop looking for something that can't be found in a dump like Radha Soami following a Oppressive egotistical tyrant baba like Gurinder Singh Dhillion
Live life while you still can, wine anyone?
Posted by: Manoj | March 13, 2022 at 01:29 PM
Happiness is a transitory sense of pleasure.
When you experience something that you like you are happy. When you experience something you don’t like, you are unhappy. If you believe you can find happiness in any human experience, you are going to be unhappy when you find out you can’t. The pursuit of happiness sets up the conditions for unhappiness as happiness cannot be maintained as a permanent experience. Therefore, when such happy experience inevitably comes to an end, the experience is replaced with unhappiness.
Contentment is the joyful acceptance of the transitory nature of all human experience.
Posted by: Roger | March 13, 2022 at 06:41 PM
Hi AR
I'm the absence of inner peace, inner happiness, then there is only sensual pleasure, mental pleasure,...
"I feel good..."
"I enjoy having this person in my life..."
"I enjoy driving my car..."
"I enjoy eating this food..."
It is just as simple as the cartoon states. In that moment, pleasure is our happiness.
But unfortunately, these pleasures depend on having certain things, certain relationships, free time, freedom from toil, freedom of want, freedom from injury, freedom from pain, freedom from fear, freedom from anxiety, freedom from anger, freedom from jealousy, freedom from from desire, freedom from oppression, freedom from denial.
If a bubble bath can do all that, I say that's wonderful.
Until it can't.
Until it is over.
Because we don't live in a bathtub. And I don't think we would want to.
So it can't last. And that experience actually has little to do with the bathtub, the house, the food and drink, these are external conditions for an internal experience. And all of them are not necessary.
What are the conditions for that internal experience, and I have that happiness last?
First and foremost that we have a clear conscience.
Not what we insist to others, but that we are true to ourselves.
We can't run from that for long. We can't hide from that for long.
That may take a little more work.
Posted by: Spence Tepper | March 14, 2022 at 05:30 AM
Oops typo
Not "I'm the absence..."
But "In the absence."
Posted by: Spence Tepper | March 14, 2022 at 05:44 AM
Agreed, Spence. Like I'd said, the Buddhistic critique does apply. But not, like I'd said, the "harm" critique that you'd argued.
Posted by: Appreciative Reader | March 14, 2022 at 11:02 AM
😂 Awesome. Keep it simple.
Posted by: S | March 17, 2022 at 11:31 PM