Different Realities

Henri Eugène Augustin Le Sidaner

Then is it surprising that the views of men who lack experience of the truth should be as unsound about pleasure and pain and the neutral state between them as they are about a good many other things? When they are subjected to pain, they will think they are in pain and their pain will be real. But they will be convinced that the transition from pain to the neutral state brings satisfaction and pleasure, whereas in fact their lack of experience of true pleasure leads them to make a false contrast between pain and the absence of pain, just as someone who had never seen white might similarly contrast grey with black. 

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Then which group has a fuller share of pure reality, things like bread, meat and drink and food generally, or things like judgement, knowledge, understanding and, in brief, all excellencies of mind? Put the question this way - which do you think is more truly real, something which belongs to the realm of unchanging and eternal truth, exists in it and is of its nature, or something which belongs to the realm of change and mortality, exists in it and is of its nature?

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So in general the sort of thing that supplies the needs of the body is less true and less real than the sort of thing that supplies the needs of the mind.

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Those, therefore, who have no experience of wisdom and goodness, and do nothing but have a good time, spend their life straying between the bottom and middle in our illustration, and never rise higher to see or reach the true top, nor achieve any real fulfillment or sure and unadulterated pleasure. They bend over their tables, like sheep with heads bent over their pasture and eyes on the ground, they stuff themselves and copulate, and in their greed for more they kick and butt each other with hooves and horns of steel, and kill each other because they are not satisfied, as they cannot be while they fill with unrealities a part of themselves which is itself unreal and insatiable.

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And are not the pleasures of such a life inevitably mixed with pain, and so an empty sham and mere phantoms of true pleasure? Both owe their apparent intensity to mutual contrast, and breed mad desires in the hearts of fools, who fight about them as Stesichorus said the heroes fought at Troy about a mere phantom of Helen because they were ignorant of the truth.

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I think that we may venture to conclude that if our desire for gain and our ambition will follow the guidance of knowledge and reason, and choose and pursue only such pleasures as wisdom indicates, the pleasures they achieve will be the truest of which they are capable, because truth is their guide, and will also be those proper to them - for isn't what is proper to a thing what is best for it?

Plato, The Republic, translated by Desmond Lee

변하지 않고 영원한, 최고조의 진짜 기쁨, 혹은 쾌락이 있는 줄을 모르고 

너무 쉽게 만족하여 철퍼덕 앉아버리는 경우.

저가 보고 듣고 느끼고 아는 것이 세상에 존재하는 전부인 양

이래도 흥 저래도 흥, 한쪽만 살짝 올라가는 입이 고정되어버리는 경우.

가 대부분인데.

의식하지 않고 있을 땐 나 역시 우스꽝스럽게 이 둘 사이를 왔다갔다하고 있다. 

what's truly real to me is yet indescribable.. except that it's something resonates with the verse, "store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also (Matthew 6:20-21)". hope someday i can do better than this.