A repost of one of my facebook posts

'It seemed to me that men were born only to grow old, to live out their span, to acquire experience. Men lived to acquire experience; the quality of the experience was immaterial; pleasure and pain--and, above all, pain--had no meaning; to possess pain was as meaningless as to chase pleasure. And even when the illumination vanished, became as thin and half nonsensical as dream, I remembered that I had had it, that knowledge about the illusion of pain.' ~ VS Naipaul, A Bend in the River

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My comment on this post on facebook back on  06 April, 2015. (Edited)

'The unity of experience', 'the illusion of pain' are, for me, like the interplay between sadism and masochism, the former begetting the later desperation standing on two different rawness defined by endless self-interest. The illusion, however backed by some sentimental or spiritual ground at last, is as variably risky as the interpretation of a presented idea of any. It's up to if the aggregated experience is workable, though desperate, through one last crash course for some sounder illumination or not, and for which, I think, the need of paramount importance is a workable ground of philosophical enlightenment which is itself heuristic, ever learning, adjustable and thereby robust ever.