Seeking Delight

This is my second post in this blog dedicated to exploring my own self.  In my first post, I tried to express how difficult it can be.  In this post, I'm going to actually start.

Many different people have many different ideas about exactly what a self is. I don't claim to have a clear picture. But I know that this self feels, it thinks, it makes choices. It get hungry and eats, it gets lonely and cries, it thinks something is funny and it laughs. I could go on and on, but you know what I'm talking about, because you are a self, too.

When all is said and done, at the most fundamental level, it seems to come down to this: This self can feel both good and bad, and without any doubt this self would rather feel good than feel bad.

To me, that is where I start. I want to feel good more often and bad less often. In fact, if I could, I would like to feel good all the time and never feel bad. This is so obvious that I fear you may think me silly for even stating it. But I just want to be clear, because everything else I say in the blog will rest upon this one concept.

To be honest, I can't imagine anybody feeling any differently. That is, I can't imagine any "self" denying that he would rather feel good than feel bad. I can't even imagine that God or Jesus would deny that he would rather feel good than feel bad. It just seems to me that this preference for feeling good over feeling bad is inextricably linked to any thing that you would call a self.

Another way of saying that same thing is that I seek delight (hence the name for this blog). I thought about other words before I decided on the word delight. I also considered words like self interest, pleasure, joy, good feelings and peace. I was looking for a way to express the fundamental motivation of this thing that is my "self". I settled on the word delight is because it is a general word for "feeling good", but also because it has a nice ring to it and makes for a nice little pun. "Seeking delight" sounds a lot like "seeking the light", which would imply a search for the truth at the same time that I am seeking literal delight.

Let me clarify a few things. First, if I'm in pain, I don't necessarily seek delight. Instead, I seek to be free from pain. Imagine a number line that spans from -10 on the left to +10 on the right, where -10 represents the most intense pain and +10 represents the most utter delight. When I say that I seek delight, I really mean that I seek to move to the right on the scale. If I'm at a -5, which would represent significant pain, then moving to zero would be a significant improvement and would fall under the definition of what I mean when I say that I seek delight. Seeking delight, as I use it, just means seeking to feel better rather than worse, and delight is at the far end of the scale on the good side.

A second point I want to clarify refers to hedonism. I don't consider myself a hedonist, at least not in the way that I understand that word. According to dictionary.com, a hedonist is "a person whose life is devoted to the pursuit of pleasure and self-gratification". That might sound similar to what I am at trying to express, but there are a couple of significant differences between me and my understanding of a traditional hedonist.

First, a traditional hedonist tends to pursue physical pleasure. I include physical pleasure in my definition of what I pursue, but I don't limit my definition to physical pleasure. In fact, I would say the greatest feelings that I can feel are non-physical.

Second, a traditional hedonist tends to pursue immediate pleasure. I am not concerned about how soon the pleasure comes, but am instead concerned about maximizing the total pleasure that a certain action will bring. So, my goal of maximizing my delight may very well include working hard to accomplish a certain satisfying goal. If the good feelings I ultimately receive from my efforts outweigh the bad feelings that it took for me to achieve it, then the net sum of delight is positive, and so those efforts would fall within my definition of seeking delight.

So, in summary, I am exploring my own self. In doing so, the first thing I notice is that I would rather feel good than feel bad. In other words, I seek delight. That may seem obvious to you, but it so important to everything else that follows that I want to be very clear about it.