Our Addiction To Pleasure & Desire is Threatening Our Demise
If we examine the current state of global affairs one might quickly surmise that, on the whole, things aren’t looking so good.
We are consuming and polluting ourselves to death, we know it, and apparently we can’t stop. If this doesn’t sound like an addiction, I don’t know what is.
The rate of environmental degradation, species extinction, pollution, and planetary warming all appear to be accelerating at an alarming rate.
If we look more closely, can it not be seen that the cause of this degradation is money and our lust for it? And, if we look still further can it not also be seen that money comes from us? That it is a creation of ours? It is not a product of our human thought? So then it would appear that the root of our problem is our addiction to thought.
So stepping back we can see that this creation of thought called money produces great desire within us based on the pleasure it creates when it is possessed. The pleasure taking the form of both physical and psychological security, status, prestige, power, station, privilege, freedom, leisure, etc.. It allows us to further obtain all manner and manifestations of the objects of desire, the things that, again, bring us pleasure in some way.
It is the author’s contention that by understanding the nature of this creation of ours called “money” we will learn a great deal about ourselves. That is to say, we will learn a great deal about the thing that created it, the thing that runs us…, that runs the world, thought.
If we study the nature of money closely, we will also uncover the nature of thought itself, and intern come to understand thought’s relationship to desire. We will then see the way thought itself is working in us all the time, and then be able to see the root cause of all our problems.
It may be seen that the nature, characteristics, and quality of this concept called money actually embodies the pattern of the nature, characteristics, and quality of all concepts in the same way that the study of a single human’s anatomy applies to all humans.
While there is nothing inherently wrong with desire in and of itself, where there appears to be a problem is when thought steps in and chews over the delight of some experience and turns it into pleasure. It records the experience, then compares it with the present, then judges and says “I must have it again”. Thought turns the experience into a memory that it wants to repeat.
The more one thinks about the experience, the more the memory is nourished and strengthened. The more it is repeated, the more mechanical it becomes. Thought creates and sustains pleasure through the use of memory by cultivating desire which then gives the pleasure continuity. Therefore, the natural reaction of desire to any pleasurable thing is perverted by thought.
It may also be noted at this point that memory also has its place and is required for us to physically function, however, in this instance we seam to be crippled by it.
When desire is thwarted the whole host of negative human emotions are experienced such as sadness, fear, anxiety, discontent, envy, anger, and even hatred. Just observe this in oneself.
Now, it is not the author’s intention to cast any judgement what-so-ever on the phenomena of money, thought, memory, pleasure, and desire but rather to seek a total and complete understanding of these things and there relationship to one another. It is the author’s intention to examine the nature of this phenomena together with the reader as if we’re both studying the situation to learn from it, in order to understand it like a scientist studies a deadly virus in order to understand how to come by a cure for it.
So then it would seem that a total understanding of these things would be in our best interest. To understand what exactly money is as a creation of thought. What are it’s characteristics? Its attributes? Its properties? How is it actually working? Not how it’s supposed to work, or how it was intended to work, but actually working right now for the fact of “what is” is all that is of concern here. How is it related to pleasure and desire? How does it effect us? How do we effect it?
It may also be noted at this point that it may be seen that thought is also responsible for all forms of human conflict, both internal, and external. And so again, by understanding the nature of thought we may also get to the root of the constant existential threat of global warfare as well.
Therefore, circling back to the concept of money, we may readily observe that the intention of its creation is for us to acquire and use it for our security. Because of the nature of thought, the creation of the notion of “security” must also create it’s opposite “insecurity”. Since we depend on money for our security, we are then caught up in this constant drive to obtain it in order to avoid the opposite of insecurity that is created by its absence.
Any concept must create it’s inverse, or negative, in order for that concept to exist, therefore, everything exists only as pairs of mutually dependent opposites. Hence a creation of thought which we depend on for our security such as money produces in us, a great urge/force of will/desire for that thing, for if we don’t have that thing, we experience it’s unwanted opposite. This then sets the stage for seeming eternal struggle and ever-lasting conflict. So we wind up like a dog forever chasing its own tail until…, until it finally collapses from exhaustion.
Please examine what is said here for oneself. Do not take the authors word for it, for it is only in one’s own ability to “see” what is being pointed to here that a true, lasting, and radical change in human consciousness can occur.
And when one examines this, be sure to do so without any motive, for if you have a motive it will dictate the answer.
