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(40) If birth is to be obtained over a heap of impurities, a sensation that it is sweet-smelling will attract one towards that impure mass, and birth will be obtained thereby.

(341) A creature's pleasures are extravagant and luxurious; sunk in lust and looking for pleasure, men undergo (again and again) birth and decay.

(24) Others who have accumulated merit, and devoted themselves sincerely to religion, will experience various delightful pleasures and happiness and ease in full measure. But that class of neutral beings who have neither earned merit nor created bad karma will experience neither pleasure nor pain, but a sort of colourless stupidity of indifference. O nobly-born, whatever cometh in that manner — whatever delightful pleasures thou mayst experience — be not attracted by them; dote not [on them]: think, 'May the Guru and the Trinity be worshipped [with these merit-given delights]'. Abandon all dotings and hankerings.

(78) And whilst it is but glimmering, it is only a gentle soft longing Delight, or pleasing Lust in thee, and does not consume thee; but if thy Heart be in a greater Commotion, and thou kindlest the sweet Quality or Fountain, so that it becomes a burning Flame, then thou kindlest all the qualifying or fountain Spirits, and then the whole Body burns, and to Mouth and Hands fall on to Work.

(3) 'That by which we know form, taste, smell, sounds, and loving touches, by that also we know what exists besides. This is that (which thou hast asked for).'

(19) Thus what we know as pleasure and pain may be identified: pain is our perception of a body despoiled, deprived of the image of the soul; pleasure our perception of the living frame in which the image of the soul is brought back to harmonious bodily operation. The painful experience takes place in that living frame; but the perception of it belongs to the sensitive phase of the soul, which, as neighbouring the living body, feels the change and makes it known to the principle, the imaging faculty, into which the sensations finally merge; then the body feels the pain, or at least the body is affected: thus in an amputation, when the flesh is cut the cutting is an event within the material mass; but the pain felt in that mass is there felt because it is not a mass pure and simple, but a mass under certain conditions; it is to that modified substance that the sting of the pain is present, and the soul feels it by an adoption due to what we think of as proximity.

And, itself unaffected, it feels the corporeal conditions at every point of its being, and is thereby enabled to assign every condition to the exact spot at which the wound or pain occurs. Being present as a whole at every point of the body, if it were itself affected the pain would take it at every point, and it would suffer as one entire being, so that it could not know, or make known, the spot affected; it could say only that at the place of its presence there existed pain- and the place of its presence is the entire human being. As things are, when the finger pains the man is in pain because one of his members is in pain; we class him as suffering, from his finger being painful, just as we class him as fair from his eyes being blue.

But the pain itself is in the part affected unless we include in the notion of pain the sensation following upon it, in which case we are saying only that distress implies the perception of distress. But we cannot describe the perception itself as distress; it is the knowledge of the distress and, being knowledge, is not itself affected, or it could not know and convey a true message: a messenger, affected, overwhelmed by the event, would either not convey the message or not convey it faithfully.

(14) 'They perceive that highest indescribable pleasure, saying, This is that. How then can I understand it? Has it its own light, or does it reflect light?'

(68) such a Source has Joy, and from the same Substance as the Wrath. That is, when the Gall in the Loving or Sweet Quality is inflamed, in that which Man is in love withal, then the whole Body trembles for the Joy, in which many Times the Astral Spirits are affected also, when the Gall is overflown, and is kindled in the Sweet Quality.

(64) Timaeus: When an affection which is against nature and violent occurs within us with intensity it is painful, whereas the return back to the natural condition, when intense, is pleasant ; and an affection which is mild and gradual is imperceptible, while the converse is of a contrary character. And the affection which, in its entirety, takes place with ease is eminently perceptible, but it does not involve pain or pleasure; such, for example, are the affections of the visual stream itself, which, as we said before, becomes in the daylight a body substantially one with our own. For no pains are produced therein by cuttings or burnings

(27) For the feeling of pleasure is not at all a necessity, but the accompaniment of certain natural needs - hunger, thirst, cold, marriage. If, then, it were possible to drink without it, or take food, or beget children, no other need of it could be shown. For pleasure is neither a function, nor a state, nor any part of us; but has been introduced into life as an auxiliary, as they say salt was to season food. But when it casts off restraint and rules the house, it generates first concupiscence, which is an irrational propension and impulse towards that which gratifies it; and it induced Epicurus to lay down pleasure as the aim of the philosopher. Accordingly he deifies a sound condition of body, and the certain hope respecting it. For what else is luxury than the voluptuous gluttony and the superfluous abundance of those who are abandoned to self-indulgence? Diogenes writes significantly in a tragedy: "Who to the pleasures of effeminate And filthy luxury attached in heart, Wish not to undergo the slightest toil."

(65) Timaeus: pains when they suffer alteration, and pleasures when they are restored to their original state. And all those bodies which undergo losses of substance and emptyings that are gradual, but replenishings that are intense and abundant, become insensitive to the emptyings but sensitive to the replenishings; consequently, they furnish no pains to the mortal part of the soul, but the greatest pleasures—a result which is obvious in the case of perfumes. But all those parts which undergo violent alterations, and are restored gradually and with difficulty

(74) But here thou must know, that this Quality penetrates very gently and pleasantly with its Touching or Stirring, through all the Spirits, in such a Way and Manner, as when a pleasant and meek Fire of Joy rises up in the Heart of a Man, in which Fire of Joy, the animated or soulish Spirit triumphs as if it were in Heaven.

(38) The Sour Quality is set opposite to the Bitter and Sweet, and is a good Temper to all, a refreshing and cooling when the bitter and sweet Qualities are elevated too much; it is a longing Delight in the Taste, a Pleasure of Life, a stirring, boiling, flowing Joy in every Thing; a Desire, Longing, and Lust of Joyfulness, a still Joy or Habitation of the Spirit; thus it is a Temperature to all living and moving Creatures.

(33) Think that you suffer a great punishment when you obtain the object of corporeal desire; for the attainment of such objects never satisfies desire.

(20) As with bodily pain and pleasure so with the bodily desires; their origin, also, must be attributed to what thus stands midway, to that Nature we described as the corporeal.

Body undetermined cannot be imagined to give rise to appetite and purpose, nor can pure soul be occupied about sweet and bitter: all this must belong to what is specifically body but chooses to be something else as well, and so has acquired a restless movement unknown to the soul and by that acquisition is forced to aim at a variety of objects, to seek, as its changing states demand, sweet or bitter, water or warmth, with none of which it could have any concern if it remained untouched by life.

In the case of pleasure and pain we showed how upon distress follows the knowledge of it, and that the soul, seeking to alienate what is causing the condition, inspires a withdrawal which the member primarily affected has itself indicated, in its own mode, by its contraction. Similarly in the case of desire: there is the knowledge in the sensation and in the next lower phase, that described as the "Nature" which carries the imprint of the soul to the body; that Nature knows the fully formed desire which is the culmination of the less formed desire in body; sensation knows the image thence imprinted upon the Nature; and from the moment of the sensation the soul, which alone is competent, acts upon it, sometimes procuring, sometimes on the contrary resisting, taking control and paying heed neither to that which originated the desire nor to that which subsequently entertained it.

But why, thus, two phases of desire; why should not the body as a determined entity be the sole desirer?

Because there are two distinct things, this Nature and the body, which, through it, becomes a living being: the Nature precedes the determined body which is its creation, made and shaped by it; it cannot originate the desires; they must belong to the living body meeting the experiences of this life and seeking in its distress to alter its state, to substitute pleasure for pain, sufficiency for want: this Nature must be like a mother reading the wishes of a suffering child, and seeking to set it right and to bring it back to herself; in her search for the remedy she attaches herself by that very concern to the sufferer's desire and makes the child's experience her own.

In sum, the living body may be said to desire of its own motion in a fore-desiring with, perhaps, purpose as well; Nature desires for, and because of, that living body; granting or withholding belongs to another again, the higher soul.

(79) Or if by Tasting it should fall into a Desire and Longing, to eat that which is not of the Quality of the Body, or is none of its own; as Mother Eve in Paradise fell a Longing to eat of the Devil's Swine-apples, and did eat thereof; such Stirring in Lust the Council also rejects.