Illusion is the first of all pleasures. –Voltaire
Good day, Gentle Reader. I concluded PART I with a question: ‘Why did the Grand Promise fail and become the Grand Illusion?’ Today we will briefly explore the ‘Why.’
The failure is rooted in our Cultural System. There are two major tap roots that feed, nurture and sustain our Culture: (1) the aim of life is happiness (think: maximum pleasure); happiness is defined as any desire, want, subjective need a person may feel (the technical term is radical hedonism); (2) that egotism (think: self-centeredness) and greed are the pathways to harmony and peace and contentment. For thousands of years none of the great Masters that such desire constituted an ethical norm. These Masters were concerned with our optimal well-being (think: our Physical, Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual well-being). For these Masters an essential element in their thinking was a clear distinction between those desires (wishes, wants, subjective needs) that are subjectively felt and whose satisfaction leads to momentary pleasure and those high priority needs that are rooted in human nature and thus whose realization is conducive and supports healthy human development and produces Eudaimonia (‘well-being’).
If we are paying attention – if we are awake and aware – we will notice that observable data continues to reveal that our kind of pursuit of happiness does not produce well-being. As a society we are an unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent on and addicted to distraction and lovers of violence. We actually ‘kill the time’ we are so anxious to save. Even though the great wisdom traditions tell us, over and over and over Be Not Afraid! we continue to be fear-full.
We have been immersed for hundreds of years in the greatest social experiment ever made – to answer the question whether pleasure can be a satisfactory solution to the challenge of human existence. The grand experiment continues to affirm a negative response and yet because of our addiction to pleasure we are not willing to seek another solution.
In PART III we will briefly explore the second premise (see it above).
Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion. –Arthur Koestler
Searcher-Seeker 