Most of us have a complicated relationship to pleasure. For an animal, the pleasure-pain calculus is straightforward. Animals seek pleasure and avoid pain; the aim is to obtain the greatest pleasure with the least pain.
Humans also avoid pain and seek pleasure. But there is something in the experience of pleasure which animals don’t have. For humans the deeper and more intense kinds involve what the Greeks called ekstatsis, being beside oneself, united with the thing experienced. This loss of our selves to beauty, to a lover, or to God, is something we crave and fear. Not all pleasure calls this up; Ice cream, summer movies, or a hot bath are unproblematic. But there are some kinds of experience such as love, music, or art, forests, mountains, or mystical states which breach the boundaries between your self and the world. People speak of being “transported” (where they could not say) and the boundaries of skin and self become permeable.
When Sleepers Awaken
I am reminded of Sleeping Beauty. The real story begins at the kiss. Year by year the sleeper is awakened more fully to her body, to her own particular mind. She comes to fully inhabit time. And when the prince looks on her life without flinching, taking in her fears, her longings and the frail reed of her body, he comes to realize that he was also a sleep walker and in that kiss a secret which his imagination could not have predicted was revealed: he could not belong only to himself. Then the real love affair begins.