Agony and Ecstasy

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there is no opposite, a search for which would equally be the search
for another ideal, leading to renewed frustration.
In this understanding, all desire for gratification is meaningless;
and there just is no place for dissatisfaction when there is no
ideal, no ‘self’, no search for pleasure. When all that ceases there
is the supreme peace of happiness, without opposite, without conflict,
without ‘self’. Such is the state of mind one cannot know, for
knowledge is never an experience, and in experiencing this absorbing
trance, there is no knowledge which is memory, which is reflection,
which is ‘self’.
And that brings us to a state of mind of which we are not aware,
a state of ease, which is to the mind as health to the body.
The Ease of Well-Being
We have seen already that there can be rapturous joy (pīti) without
the feeling of happiness (sukha-vedanā); When, therefore, we meet
with the satisfaction of well-being after the rapture of joy has been
surpassed, it is obvious that this is not just a sensation of happy
satisfaction and neither a factor or component (cetasikā) of a happy
state of mind.
Ease (sukha) is indeed a peace beyond thought and feeling. As
feeling (vedanā) is found as an essential constituent of any thought
(sabba-citta-sādhāraṇa), it can be pleasant, unpleasant or indifferent.
Then it merely follows contact (phassa) and precedes perception
(saññā); then it is a sense experience which will be stored as
memory (saññā) from which the mind will make up ‘thought’ with
its manifold components (saṅkhāra) before becoming a full-grown,
conscious and volitional experience (viññāṇa), with responsibility
for action and reaction (kāmavipāka).
A feeling of the senses, that is, a sensation (vedanā), can have
as its object of sensitivity either pleasure (sukha), pain (dukkha), or
neutral feelings (adukkha-m-asukha), in which distinction pleasure