If misery is an undeniable reality, then is its opposite – joy – also an undeniable reality?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Thank you.
So, if we say there is a baseline of misery as absolute, can we say also that there must be an absolute pleasure as its opposite? If we, see there is, we can look at it from experience, we can look at it from reasoning, we can look at it from revelation. So, now from reasoning, you can say it’s reasonable. Yes, that if there is distress, there should be the opposite of distress, there should be happiness.
Now, from experience, we can say that we do experience duality at the material level. Now, wherever there is happiness, there is a stress, there are two sides of the same coin. But now, there is something else going on.
The Bhagavad Gita talks about duality, and then it also talks about misery beyond the duality. What I mean by this is that in everybody’s lives, there are ups and downs. But at the same time, beyond the ups and downs, still life remains down.
And some, just yesterday I wrote an article on my Gita daily, even if we fare well in life, we still have to say farewell to life. So, ultimately, there is an Italian saying that at the end of a chess match, both the king and the pawn go into the same box. So, there is, beyond the duality that we experience, there is an ultimate misery.
So, we have experience of pleasure, pain, duality at the material level, but then there is ultimate misery. So, we could, from our experience, is there something like ultimate happiness? Presently, we have not experienced it. But it is a reasonable inference.
And the idea is that if there were no ultimate pleasure, then why would we have this hope for pleasure? I talked earlier about people who lose their eyes because of some accident. Now, they feel the loss of their eyes because people around them have eyes. If there were a kingdom where everybody were blind, then nobody would realize they are blind.
Isn’t it? So, the fact that we long for pleasure, and not just brief pleasure, but lasting happiness, that we could say is a, why do we long for it if nothing like that is at all ever there? That longing itself is indicative and we can make a reasonable inference. That there is something eternal. We all long for lasting life and lasting love.
And there is nothing around us which lasts. Everything is temporary. And where do we get this longing for anything lasting from? Could it be from a level of reality that is lasting in itself? Could it be that within us we are eternal and we are looking for that eternal externally? So, it’s a reasonable inference to make.
But till we get that spiritual realization, I am not sure whether we could make an ironclad case for that. For misery, we can make a fairly strong case. But for its opposite, we can make a reasonable inference.
Do you want to add anything?