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The balance between pleasure and pain?
We know pain slows us down and makes us ill, and we know that with pleasure health and life improves. Pain and suffering tempers our spirit and will to live and can create powerful characters, yet it also weakens and destroys our bodies shortening life.

Many people when they think of pleasure turn their minds immediately to sex as it is one of civilisations most promoted forms of pleasure and it is often used as a quick fix to relieve stress, but there is more to life than sex. Our bodies and minds have many senses which are able to perceive and feel pleasure and pain.

One of the observations obvious to some is that pleasure is an indulgence, a time out for recreation be it on the sports field or a brothel. But these pleasures are transient - short lived

The new management of this site feel that pleasure is our birthright and the opposite of the suffering that consumes many lives. We know that pleasure equates to freedom and happiness, yet many societies teach that pleasure is bad - unhealthy even and that we must suffer in misery, service and blind faith and allegiance to leaders (the rich and powerful) who use their positions of power to enjoy the pleasures denied to their people.

Wealth is desirable as it brings a certain freedom and pleasure, but it also carries a responsibility as those who gain pleasure at the cost of others will suffer eventually as what we put out, is returned.

Pleasure describes the broad class of mental states that humans and other animals experience as positive, enjoyable, or worth seeking. It includes more specific mental states such as happiness, entertainment, enjoyment, ecstasy, and euphoria. In psychology, the pleasure principle describes pleasure as a positive feedback mechanism, motivating the organism to recreate in the future the situation which it has just found pleasurable. According to this theory, organisms are similarly motivated to avoid situations that have caused pain in the past.

The experience of pleasure is subjective and different individuals will experience different kinds and amounts of happiness in the same situation. Many pleasurable experiences are associated with satisfying basic biological drives, such as eating, exercise or sex. Other pleasurable experiences are associated with social experiences and social drives, such as the experiences of accomplishment, recognition, and service. The appreciation of cultural artefacts and activities such as art, music, and literature is often pleasurable.

In recent years, significant progress has been made in understanding the brain mechanisms underlying pleasure. One of the key discoveries was made by Kent C. Berridge who has shown that pleasure is not a unitary experience. Rather, pleasure consists of multiple brain processes including liking, wanting and learning subserved by distinct yet partially overlapping brain networks. In particular, this research has been helped by the use of objective pleasure-elicited reactions in humans and other animals such as the behavioural ‘liking’/‘disliking’ facial expressions to tastes that are homologous between humans and many other mammals.

Recreational drug use can be pleasurable: some drugs, illicit and otherwise, directly create euphoria in the human brain when ingested. The mind's natural tendency to seek out more of this feeling (as described by the pleasure principle) can lead to dependence and addiction. Berridge and Robinson have proposed that addiction results from drugs hijacking the ‘wanting’ system through a sensitization of the mesolimbic dopamine system.

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