200 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
the pleasure of striving. But if anyone claims that the pain
of disappointed hope adds to the pain of an unattained
goal, and makes the pain of unfulfillment greater in the
end than the pleasure there might have been in the fulfill-
ment, we would have to reply that the opposite can also
occur. The recollection of pleasure will just as often have
a mitigating effect on the pain of unfulfillment. Anyone
who cries out, in the face of shattered hopes, “I have done
all that I could!” is proof of this. The blissful sense of hav-
ing tried to do one’s best is overlooked by those who, with
every unfulfilled desire, assert that not only is the joy of
fulfillment absent, but even the enjoyment of desiring it-
self is destroyed.
Fulfillment of desire evokes pleasure, and nonfulfill-
ment evokes pain. But we must not conclude from this
that pleasure is satisfaction of desire and pain is its non-
satisfaction. Both pleasure and pain can be present in
someone without being a consequence of desire. Illness
is pain that is not preceded by desire. Anyone claiming
that illness is an unsatisfied desire for health errs in see-
ing the obvious wish not to become sick, a wish that is
never brought into awareness, as a positive desire. If we
inherit a legacy from a rich relative of whose existence
we had no notion, it fills us with a pleasure that had no
preceding desire.
Those who wish to investigate whether there is an ex-
cess on the side of pleasure or pain must take into ac-
count the pleasure of desiring—the pleasure of the
fulfillment of desire—and the pleasure that comes to us
without effort. On the other side of the ledger, they must
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