Sensation Defines How You Experience Living

There is the sensitivity of sensory perceptions - of hearing, seeing, touching, smelling, and tasting - of your entire nervous system and of every cell in your body. This sensory activity of the living body is all that is directly connecting us to the world we live in.

Language increases the complexity and functions of thinking, from which we make up and add values and preferences to life. This creates a conflict between these preferences of how life should be (only an ideal) and life as it already is (actual reality). This thinking causes dissatisfaction with yourself and life no matter how these are.

To make up for the underlying sense of dissatisfaction or emptiness this causes, we superimpose something other than sensitivity upon the natural function of living, in an attempt to get more out of it. That something is sensuality, or attempted prolonged pleasure.

It is this ever increasing, self-perpetuating demand for pleasure that is really the problem. Basically, we sense or experience life as it is, and then we think up something more desirable, causing dissatisfaction with how life is. Through adding these preferences to life as it is, we superimpose that imagined view over what is real and already there. Thereby we create the artificial thought induced state of sensuality.

Consequently, through our complex thinking we render life as it really is, inaccessible to being sensed and understood as it naturally should be - via the sense organs, the nervous system and every cell of the living body.

Complex, preferential thinking destroys the natural sensitivity of these bodily functions, numbing us and therefore leading to an ever-increasing need for the hit or high of artificial sensuality or thought induced pleasures. This is the basis of all addictions.

Sensations translated as pleasurable or unnaturally prolonged are harming us.

The translation of any single sensation as a pleasurable one is the beginning of the problem. For we attempt to prolong that sensation for longer than its natural duration through the continuation of our thoughts about it. For pleasure, we prolong stimulation or any number of pleasurable fantasies by repeatedly thinking about them.
These build up tensions in the body, for which there is no real life expression or release. This is both harmful to the body and leads to extremities and perversions. Fantasies and repetitious thinking are actually distracting you from and causing your neglect of your life in the real world, and developing a tendency for vagueness.

The prolonging of sensations soon becomes a general and fixed behaviour, and inevitably, you can't stop yourself prolonging all sensation, whether pleasurable or painful. This fixed behaviour is the problem, for inevitably you will find yourself prolonging not just pleasure but also pain beyond its natural duration. A common example of the pain side of this behavior is when we repeatedly think over an argument that is long gone, unintentionally prolonging our distress. Other adaptions or symptoms of this fixed behaviour are emotionalism and dramatizations, which prolong and exaggerate sensations by either complaining ( prolonging pain) or bragging and exaggerating (prolonging pleasure).

Any sensation that is forced to last longer than its natural duration destroys the sensitivity of the nervous system, and thereby our ability to feel the 'fullness' of living our lives is lost. Hence, we turn more and more to sensuality (emotionalism, exaggerations, fantasy, and dramatizations) as we deteriorate into a more shallow and more numb existence.

The body naturally rejects both pain and pleasure at their appropriate duration for this simple reason. Prolonged, they harmfully destroy our sensitivity, which is all we have for true contact with and receptivity to others, and the world we live in. It is the prerequisite for understanding life and therefore - lacking sensitivity - we confuse the simple acts of living.

When you cease translating sensations as pleasurable, all sensations, pleasurable or otherwise are tolerable as they are, there in the flesh. It is whether you experience sensation as it is or perverted by thought's translation, that defines how you experience every aspect of your life, including - others, the world in general and yourself.