Preyas and Shreyas: Balancing Short-term Pleasure with Long-term Good

Preyas and Shreyas: Balancing Short-term Pleasure with Long-term Good

00:45 It’s All About Knowledge

The contrast between preyas, which is defined as short-term pleasure, and shreyas, which is long-term sustained happiness, is a very interesting contrast. I’m fond of saying to people who are terribly worried about sustainable lifestyle elements—you know, they’re very diligent.

They’re very diligent, for the most part, about sustainable lifestyle. “Is it sustainable for me to do this? Is it sustainable for me to do that? Is it sustainable for me to eat this way? Is it sustainable for me to exercise to this extent or not exercise to this extent? Is it sustainable? Is it sustainable?”

And I’m fond of saying to people that it’s perfectly all right to do anything that is unsustainable, so long as you know that it’s unsustainable. And so really what this is all about is knowledge. It’s all about knowledge.

If all we’re going to do is lead a highly sustainable lifestyle from birth until body death, but never have any departure from sustainability, then we’re going to have an extremely boring life. This is a life where you don’t move into having to adapt to the unknown that you created.

I think people need to be adventurous. And adventurous means you move, not adventure like, you know, sometimes you see from an old people’s home a whole lot of old cronies who are being taken on an “adventure.”

Geriatric adventures; it means you get in the bus and go to the shopping center and everybody gets out on their walkers and they take an adventure while they’re shopping for, you know, the afternoon food or something. That’s not actually an adventure. We’ve really made a terrible mess of that word, “adventure.”

Adventure actually means I’m intentionally putting myself in a situation where I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t have a guarantee of safety. And being in a situation where I don’t have a guarantee of safety is what causes evolution to occur.

03:26 Evolution is Not a Straight Line

And so I’m going to put it to my listeners that, you know, the highly safe, extremely sustainable way of living your life is probably non-adventurous. And it’s removing a very important element of evolution.

When we look at the concept of evolution, evolution is not a straight line. It requires disruption. Disruption. People are always saying to me, they’ve been saying it since the 1960s, because I’ve been teaching since the 1960s, “What about the world as it is today? We’re in a terrible situation.”

I heard that in 1968. I heard it in 1969. I heard it in 1970. I heard it… shall I keep going? That’s a lot of years. I’ve been hearing it for 60 years. “Oh, the world today, but what about the world today?”

The world today is always challenging. It’s always challenging. There’s no time that the world’s not challenging. It’s just that everybody thinks they’re living in the most challenging time ever in the world.

It’s good that we live in challenging times, and it’s good that challenging times never go away. And why is that? There is no evolution without disruption. There’s no evolution without disruption.

What causes evolution to slow down is guarantees of safety. When you have guaranteed safety, you have guaranteed predictability, there’s no disruption, there’s no stimulation of the steady state to cause adaptive forms and adaptive functions to emerge.

So everything about the human body that exists, the fact that you have that many fingers, the fact that you have a nose up here, the fact that your eyes are here in this part of your face and they’re not like on a dog’s face where the nose is down and the eyes are up here, is because we have a brain that knows how to stay up and away from the rocks.

We are bipedal. We walk on our feet. Why? Because the ancestors of ours who didn’t know how to get up on their hind legs and walk, they hit their head on the rocks a lot more and they didn’t survive to reproductive age.

So they didn’t get to reproduce. The ones who figured out how to stand on their hind legs and stay up away from all the rocks and bushes, their brain began to develop more because they hit their heads less, and they survived to reproductive age more frequently and they evolved into us.

That’s why we stand on two feet even though our ancestors had four legs just like all the four-legged critters that we see around the place. Why are our eyes in the front of our face and not on the top of our head?

Because our face goes this way because we’re bipedal and we are neurocentric. Our entire body is about keeping the brain up and away from the ground that’s passing.

And we are not good athletes compared to any other animal. Humans are great athletes only in comparison to other humans. You set up a human and say, which one of you very poor runners (all humans are poor runners) compared to any animal, a household cat can outrun any gold medalist.

Any great marathon runner can be beaten by a cat or a dog or a little sparrow. Any animal can outperform any human. Humans are only great athletes (we’re all terrible athletes) we’re only great athletes compared to other poor athletes. That’s the other humans.

You might notice that in the Olympics, we don’t allow kangaroos. We don’t allow birds. Put a bird in the high jump; let’s see who wins.

06:56 We Have to Have a Blend

So what are we about? We’re not about athleticism, even though there’s nothing wrong with athleticism, so long as we can accept that we humans, relative to our cousins, the other animals, are not that particularly good at it.

But we are really good at neurocentricity, thinking about things. We can think about things. We have the capacity to arrive in cascades of conclusions. We’re the only animals on Earth that are aware of global climate change.

The other animals are not aware of it. If there’s a tiger that’s about to pounce on the last existing member of the deer family that all tigers of the future will rely upon in order to survive, that tiger’s not going to think, “Hang on, this is the last reproducing member of that species. And if I kill it, all my offspring are going to die and all tigers are going to die.” He’s just going to pounce on that deer and kill it and eat it.

But a human can stop and think, “Hang on for a sec. If the last member of that species is being killed, that’s going to be the end of that species and it will have an impact on all these other species.” That’s because we got our brain up and away from the ground.

So short term versus long term, sustainable versus unsustainable. We have to have a blend. We have to have a blend. We have to have a degree of lack of safety. In order to teach us what is long-term sustainable, we have to have the unsustainable.

The unsustainable is discomfort. Discomfort has to come in in order to cause adaptive forms and functions to appear. Without disruption of a steady state, we do not evolve and adapt, create new adaptive forms and adaptive functions.

The entire human brain and the way that it functions is not a consequence of humans having it made with a big brain from the beginning. The big brain got formed by meeting adversity.

You meet adversity, you’re challenged by it, you have to back up, you have to consider all options. And what that does is it causes dendritic growth and neuronal growth in the brain and causes the brain to build itself into a highly considerate (meaning being able to consider all possibilities) style of functioning.

Without a challenge to your expectations, you do not get evolution. And so evolution is dependent upon challenges to the steady state. Evolution is dependent upon disruption, but it’s dependent upon adaptive responses to disruption.

Fight-flight reactivity; if that’s the only thing we have in our repertoire, then we’re not getting adaptive forms and functions that are evolving. If all we’re doing is fleeing from a demand or trying to kill the demand, we’re not finding a way of interacting with the demand.

So interactive causes adaptation. Adaptation causes more optimized brain functioning. More optimized brain functioning gives us a range of choice in our experience. And it gives us the capacity for variety.

And it gives us an appetite for variety. Our appetite for variety is a very important function of being highly evolved. Appetite for variety.

So, you know, we have to have a blend of these short-term preyas and long-term shreyas, the ability to give ourselves unsustainable pleasures, and contrast that with the more sustainable pleasures; a proper mix of it, and knowing how to have balance of it.

12:07 There’s No Such Thing as Perfection in the Relative World

In the Vedic worldview, there’s no such thing as perfection in the relative world, except in one area, and that one area is a fascinating thing to examine. It’s the area of balance.

What is it that represents balance in any given moment? My favorite analogy for it is riding a bicycle. Australians call it a push bike, a bicycle with pedals.

You’re riding along and, for the beginner rider on a flat surface with no challenges, balance is straight up and down and moving forward. And if you’re moving forward at speed, it’s the same as moving fairly slowly.

The moment you create a change in the surface on which you’re riding, balance no longer is straight up and down. Now it’s this way.

If you have to go around a corner to the right, you better not stay up and down straight. You better know how to lean to the right. If the road changes and you have to go to the left, balance is now over here.

So in asking the question, where is balance on a bicycle? Well, sometimes it’s here, sometimes it’s here, sometimes it’s here, and it’s all going to be speed dependent.

How fast are you moving? What kind of surface is it? What’s the traction available on the tires? Are you on gravel so that if you go way over here, you’re going to slide? All of these equations come into play to find where balance is.

So what is balance between that which is short-term pleasure and long-term sustained happiness? There needs to be a balance of these things.

Knowing what balance is, is not something you can calculate with an algorithm in advance. You have to have, just like a great cyclist, you have to have that intrinsic feel, that intrinsic knowledge. And how do you get that?

14:19 Disruption Causes Adaptation to Occur

It’s built into your brain if only your brain is not stressed. When your brain is loaded up with the chemistry of your past reactivity to situations that you didn’t adapt to, that you had maladaptive responses to, if you’re loaded up with irrelevant chemistry, then you’re not going to be able to draw upon your intrinsic sense of what is a balanced approach.

And so you’re going to become rigidly attached to one way of doing things or another way of doing things. And usually these represent extremes.

And life lived trapped inside of an extreme, either extreme immediate pleasure, that’s addictive behavior, or extreme caution being taken, that means you live like a hermit inside of a house and you only eat special organic food that has been grown with people singing chants over it or something because you can’t handle anything else.

And if you happen to get one kernel of corn in you that didn’t have the special chanting done over it, then you’re going to practically die or break out in hives. That’s not adaptive behavior.

A proper balanced life is a life of robustness, robust capacity to interact with any environment in a way that’s appropriate to the need of the time.

So to have robustness we have to have variety, and variety means the capacity to get the correct and proper behavior in the moment, whatever that moment may call for.

And so, we have a relatively modern tendency to want to know, “What’s the way of doing things? I just want to know the way. If you show me the thing to eat, the way to behave, the way to act, the clothes to wear, the color scheme, the thing, I’ll do that thing and nothing else.”

Well this is going to create an unsustainable life with no evolution in it because there’s no disruption.

Disruption causes adaptation to occur, adaptive forms and adaptive functions. It causes forward growth and progression.

So, for all the people who are worried about “What’s it like in 2025, the worst year that’s ever existed for humanity,” you know, they were saying that back in the year 1000 and they were saying it back in 5000 BC and people have been saying that for every year that’s ever existed. Worst possible year ever.

For everybody who wishes everything would calm down, all I’m going to say is that disruption causes adaptive forms and functions to blossom. Be adaptive, be interactive, figure out how to maintain broad-spectrum responsiveness to challenges, and everything will continue evolving just beautifully the way it has ever since the Big Bang 12 billion years ago. Jai Guru Deva.

17:46 Q: What can you tell us about freeze reactivity?

Hi, Guruji. You talk a lot about fight or flight, and there’s a third response being bandied about, which is freeze. And I was wondering if you could expand on that.

17:58 A: Catatonia is the Extreme

In fight-flight reactivity, which is basically a stress reaction, it’s binary in that I’m either going to first test to see if the thing to which I cannot adapt (I’ve decided I can’t adapt, then, or perhaps instinctively I sense that I can’t adapt to a demand for change, a change of expectation has been foisted on me) then the first thing to test is, can I make the demand go away?

Make it not a demand. And that’s the fight part. It might be, I want to kill the demand. And the killing of it might be, you know, someone comes to you with a plumbing bill that was five times higher than what you expected.

“Am I going to conduct a battle with the billing department of the plumbing company and kill the demand? Maybe lessen it, maybe modify it, maybe make it go away entirely, maybe threaten to sue them,” like that. That’s the fight reactivity.

And then the flight reactivity might be, “Okay, I’m leaving town. I’m not going to be here, I’m not going to pay the bill, I’m going to vanish, I’m going to do whatever I have to do.”

And the freeze aspect is the extreme; it’s what we call catatonia. To go catatonic is also ingrained in the human physiology. It is the equivalent of certain mammals that we’ve observed and certain reptiles as well, playing dead.

Freezing is catatonia. It’s the tendency to look as though you’re actually dead, in which case the challenger who’s challenging you, the thing that’s challenging you, might go away because you look like you’re dead.

And so fight, flight, freeze. Freeze is simply the extreme of flight. The extreme fleeing is to flee into a catatonic state where it doesn’t look like anyone’s gonna get anything out of you anyway. So they hopefully will walk away.

And it obviously has worked. Fight-flight reactivity is also an evolutionary response and it’s something that’s embedded in us. It’s not that we shouldn’t be doing it. What is important is that when we have fight-flight reactivity, stress reactivity, we have to have capacity to recover.

20:38 Practice Vedic Meditation to Remove Irrelevant Neurochemistry

And this is the part that’s missing that causes the memory of fight-flight reactivity, of stress reactivity, to sustain itself, the memory in the cells.

When the memory in the cells of having reacted to a stress stimulus is still here a day later, a week later, a month later, a year later, then I’m still reacting as if the demand is here, and it’s not here anymore.

And so that means that I have built into me an accumulated bunch of reactions that no longer are relevant to the present moment. And having irrelevant reactivity makes us (tags us) as having irrelevant behavior in general.

And what does evolution do about irrelevant behavior? It causes extinction. In other words, rapid aging. Rapid aging is the consequence of stress accumulation. Rapid aging is basically Nature’s way of saying extinction.

So we die younger when we accumulate stress. And this has been demonstrated in many gerontological studies.

The more stressed somebody is, the fewer years they have to have life experience because of irrelevant reactivity plaguing them day and night.

So meditation strips away the neurochemistry of irrelevant reactivity, stress reactivity, that is no longer relevant because for the most part, unless you’re living in combat, for the most part, in the 90s of percentage of time, we’re living in relatively safe environments.

But we’re behaving; frequently our physiology belies that. If you take the average member of a 21st-century culture and measure their blood chemistry, you would think they’re living in combat, even though they are buying groceries at Whole Foods, picking up kids from school, or working in a job that they can easily accomplish the demands of, but they’re not.

Their body will show signs as if they have been challenged for their life every day of their life, even though on any objective assessment of their life, there are no actual life-threatening phenomena occurring.

The neurochemistry of life-threatening phenomena go on in your average middle-class neurotics constantly, and this is shortening the lifespan, which is sad because we have a limited amount of time in which to construct the memories that we would like to have in a lifetime, how we’d like to experience this thing.

So it’s important to meditate twice every day, to peel away these layers of irrelevant neurochemistry so that we can have the capacity to be interactive and adaptive.