Dear Happy Cow

Yesterday I heard someone making the statement that pleasure and pain are always experienced in equal amounts. It was their opinion that you cannot have 80% pleasure and 20 % pain. It is always 50-50. This I do not understand. Or perhaps I do not understand the nature of pain.

Is pain merely the absence of pleasure? If that is the case, when one is in a state of bliss they are not experiencing pleasure or pain? Can we not be in a neutral state of no pain, no pleasure, no bliss, just neutral? Or is bliss neutral? If pleasure and pain are just concepts made up by the mind then why do they not exist in the proportions we assign to them?

Thanks in advance,

Charlotte, Singapore

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