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you can compare.
Pleasure only deepens people's misery because it becomes a contrast, a backdrop. Hence the very strange phenomenon: the richer a society is, the more miserable; the poor a society is, the less miserable. In other words: the more miserable people are, the less miserable they are (laughter), because they don't have anything with which to compare. They have never known pleasure so they think this is what life is all about. They are accustomed to misery.
This you will see in the East everywhere, particularly in India. And the so-called Indian gurus go on bragging about it as if it is something spiritual. It is nothing spiritual, it is simply that people are so unacquainted with pleasure that they don't have any idea of what it can be like, even for a moment, to be without misery. They have become attuned with misery, accustomed to it. There has arisen a certain lifestyle which goes hand in hand with misery. It is not spirituality. It is a very negative state, it has nothing positive about it. Spirituality comes in only when you have tasted pleasure and now you want something more than pleasure, something that is going to abide, something that comes and never goes again.
The momentary taste of pleasure is a must for the spiritual seeker because that triggers in him an enquiry. If it is possible to be happy for a moment then why is it not possible to be happy forever? -- there seems to be no intrinsic impossibility about it. But the miserable person is absolutely unaware of it; hence I am not against pleasure, I am all for it, because I know it is only pleasure that gives you a push towards bliss. It is only pleasure that helps you to go on a tremendous journey to find the eternal.
Pleasure is like bliss seen in a dream; but if you have seen it in a dream then the desire is natural to make it a reality. The poor and the miserable have not even seen a dream, have not even tasted in a dream, what pleasure is. They are really to be pitied. They are not blessed, they are really cursed.
In my vision materialism and spiritualism are not against each other, they are not enemies. Materialism is the foundation of a real spirituality,
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