Hello Lal and HugoZyl,
I would like to contribute some of my thoughts to this discussion. Why did the Buddha refer to sense pleasures as ‘a pit of burning coals’? I am mainly familiar with this simile from two suttas:
Both suttas describe the experience of being dragged by two strong men into a pit of burning coals.
I think the Magandiya Sutta in particular makes this idea very clear: the pleasant experience is not separate from the distress that preceded it; it is merely a temporary modulation of that distress. The burning and the pleasure are not two separate events. The pleasure is soaked in the burning that made it possible.
If pleasure is structurally the temporary modulation of prior burning, then what you are craving when you crave kama is not an independent positive quality somewhere out there. You are craving your own burning, briefly reduced. The object of craving is inseparable from the suffering that makes it appear pleasant.
