Chapter One
Assaulted by a
Question
"What is it
about life that there always seems
to be something missing?" --- Epictetus
The ten thousand forms of human suffering
are but the transformations of a single dark force. Endlessly it
displays itself, and yet it remains unknown! At times its existence
may be suspected. Surmount any of life's difficulties and another one
takes its place. Overcome that problem, and a new problem arises.
Human suffering is truly the most elusive of shape-shifters.
In its plasticity, suffering bears a
curious resemblance to matter. Like matter, it can be neither created
nor destroyed. Efforts to eradicate it succeed only in changing its
form. We free ourselves from anxiety but now feel bored. We are no
longer lonely but now suffer from conflicts with others. Within these
transformations, the magnitude of suffering remains constant.
Consequently, no matter what we do to find fulfillment, we still find
that our world is "out of joint," that something is lacking.
The law guiding these changes is, "The Conservation of Suffering
Principle."
The good news is that a level of
consciousness exists beyond the force-field of the conservation of
suffering. Those who have been there have called it, "the still
point of a turning world." The Japanese philosopher Nishita
described this state of awareness when he wrote, "My joy and my
sorrow do not touch my peace." This book is a practical guide to
help you get there.
Our journey will be along a path few know
exist. It emerges out of the unique evolution and present crisis of
Western thought and civilization. Here is a route from existentialism
-- which many cultural historians consider the final stop on the long
train ride of Western thought -- to a higher level of understanding
about life. This book is essentially a roughly drawn map of the
Western route to Eastern wisdom.
This path is a via negativa. It is not
"negative" in the sense of bad or antagonistic. What makes
it a negative route is that we do not proceed directly to that which
we desire -- freedom, immortality, bliss, peace of mind, higher
consciousness, and so on. Ours is a journey in quite the opposite
direction, into the dark side of everyday life. Dante learned from his
guide, Virgil, that the exit from hell is to be found at its very
center. Paradoxically, to be free, the two of them had to proceed
deeper into hell. Likewise, our path to freedom involves a descent
into our interior "heart of darkness." We descend into these
depths with penetrating questions. The result is illuminating insights
that convert suffering into Self-knowledge.
Apart from the insights they generate,
penetrating questions are invaluable for another reason. A question
like Epictetus', "Why is there always something missing?" --
which is really an intimation of The Conservation of Suffering
Principle -- delivers us from a deadening complacency. It renews our
spirit by propelling us on a detective adventure, an adventure more
philosophical, and dangerous, than any other and far more uncanny.
Why uncanny? In a typical detective story
the sleuth knows what is missing. But he lacks knowledge of its
whereabouts, who has stolen it, and so on. Here, on the other hand,
the something that is missing was first reported missing about 2,500
years ago in Greece, and we still do not even know what it is! Yet it
is vital that we find it. To refuse the assignment is to resign
ourselves to what Thoreau called, "a life of quiet
desperation." We shall soon discover that all other mysteries
pale before this most perplexing of life's mysteries, the enigma of
human suffering. Let us begin our investigation.
The Premise
of Life's Comedy
Man's guiding star is his belief that
changes can make him happier. He dreams, "My life will improve
after I move into the new house, receive a promotion, retire from
work. Or after I have something to eat, buy a car, win the contract.
Or after my children are grown, the new president takes office, the
snow melts, the heat wave ends, we win the war..."
Endless are the images of freedom and
fulfillment that captivate us, feeding our hope that tomorrow can be
better than today. We are easily mesmerized by the advertiser's siren
song, "It's new and improved!" If our faith lies in the new
and improved, we have not yet grasped The Conservation of Suffering
Principle.
You may protest, "It's obvious that
changes do make a difference! If I win the lottery, I won't have to
work for my demanding boss. If I move, I'll be free of my noisy
neighbors. Progress is possible!" Yes, a change improves our
lives in a relative sense, by ending a particular hardship. But here
is the rub. We satisfy a desire, or overcome a difficulty, and almost
immediately the familiar hunger for "we know not what"
returns.
This hunger does not linger, for a mental
image soon appears and declares: "I'm really what you're looking
for!" Hopeful, we search for what corresponds to the image. Our
search might lead us to the distant corners of the globe, or perhaps
no further than the inner recesses of our kitchen refrigerator. We
obtain our desideratum, but immediately our lack returns. Our
imagination then cooks up a new magical image.
The cycle of frustrated hunger begins in
childhood. The joyous excitement of Christmas Eve is followed by
"Okay. What's next?" after we open the presents. In school,
we long to be free of exams. But when summer arrives, we are pursued
by the demon of boredom. We grow up, and drunk with love's promise, we
are soon sobered by family responsibilities. We look forward to
retirement, but when it arrives...
Why Do the
New Episodes Seem Like Reruns?!
Perhaps you have reached the point in
life where you have no expectations. You no longer believe in those
magical images that you formerly thought could satisfy you. You are
disillusioned.
Disillusionment comes about because you
increasingly grasp the identity, or sameness factor, amid a host of
differences. You perceive that the changes that occur are merely
variations on an all too familiar theme. Consequently, before
embarking on the evening's entertainment, you already have anticipated
the ensuing "lack." You know, before meeting him, that
husband number four will not be essentially different from the first
three. On an intuitive level, you apprehend the conservation of
suffering.
Disillusionment is potentially a very
good thing; it can be the route to spiritual awakening. But unless
accompanied by a deeper understanding of life, it usually leads to a
spiritual malaise. Your weakened psychic constitution then becomes
susceptible to the contagion of world-weariness and cynicism.
We hear this cynicism in expressions
like: "You just can't win;" or "Six of one, half a
dozen of another;" or "Same shit, different day." We
suspect that Baudelaire was correct when he wrote, "Life is a
hospital, in which all of the patients are continually trying to
change beds." For "beds" we can substitute jobs, homes,
husbands, etcetera. Mark Twain summed it up when he said, "Life
is one damn thing after another." But while many wind up
skeptics, if not cynics, they have not gone on to ask why "life
is one damn thing after another."
Rounding Up
the Usual Suspect Answers
For many people it is not really a
question. Bad things happen and there is no explanation. But they do
have sort of an explanation. They presume that something external
comes about to ruin one's happiness. In the Biblical tale, Job asks
why. But even that profound story begins with the sense that Job was
doing quite nicely until tragedy struck. People today are less
inclined to blame their gods for their present woes than they are to
blame their childhood experiences, parents, past lives, political
leaders, society, and so on. In all cases, the implication is that the
negative came and eclipsed what is normally a sunny state of affairs.
Others assume that they suffer because of
something that needs to happen that has not happened, and may never
happen. "I haven't met the right person yet," or, "I
haven't hit it big." Many people view being a wage earner as
equivalent to being a slave on a galley ship. Every week it is
decided, by means of the state lottery, who will become a
multi-millionaire and leave the ship to live like a king or a queen.
The rest of us must go back to our oars, until the next drawing.
Is unhappiness fundamentally due to
something in particular -- that has or has not happened? If someone
were asked why he was unhappy and he answered, "Because I lost my
farm," or "Because my dog died," such a response would
be quite reasonable. If he then declared, "It didn't have to
happen!" he would still be right. But he would also be naive,
because his focus would only be on his suffering's immediate cause. He
would have failed to consider its ultimate cause.
The immediate cause is always something
in particular, and the fact that it happened may be purely accidental.
But the fact that we suffer at all -- apart from the particular form
that our suffering may take -- is not accidental. If it is not a lost
farm, or a dead dog, it must, out of necessity, be other things,
equally negative, that plague us. What is this dark necessity? To
discover the ultimate cause of human suffering, we need to see --
behind the myriad shapes of suffering -- the shape-shifter himself.
Good and Bad:
Separated at Birth
There must be something intrinsic to
life's pleasures, joys, and satisfactions that makes them evanescent,
thus bringing us back to the state of dissatisfaction. Their
evanescent quality is not due to the fact that things fade and then
vanish, like flowers with the coming of the winter frost. Time is not
the real culprit, because even when life is in full bloom, life
disappoints us -- especially then. What is it about happiness that
makes it evanescent?
Examine the relation between the good
things in your life and the bad things. You will discover, not that
the bad destroys the good, but that, on the contrary, the good
entirely depends upon the bad! The pleasure of eating depends upon the
preceding hunger pangs. The pleasure of friendship depends upon the
experience of loneliness. Those who most truly appreciate wealth are
those who have known poverty. The father in the Biblical story showed
greater love for his returning prodigal son than for his obedient son
who never strayed. Those who have been to death's door can most
appreciate life. As Arthur Schopenhauer noted, "good" is
nothing more than a synonym for, "the removal of the bad."
As the bad departs, with the satisfied
desire or the solved problem, so does the concomitant good! When the
hunger vanishes, the pleasure of eating fades. The pleasure of a warm
house vanishes as we forget what it was like to be shivering outside.
Forgetting our loneliness, we begin to take our friend for granted.
Our newfound joy in being alive diminishes as our near-death encounter
begins to fade from memory. Positive and negative are inextricably
joined. For as the bad departs, the good must also take leave of us.
And as the fleeting moment of satisfaction departs, our ever-present
sense of lack returns.
What makes happiness evanescent,
therefore, is that it is always dependent upon the awareness of a
concomitant dissatisfaction. Consequently, the very achievement of
happiness -- which ends the particular dissatisfaction --
paradoxically ends the moment of happiness.
We shall briefly explore some of the
startling implications of the correlative nature of good and bad. Then
we shall face the ultimate question, "What lies behind our
unremitting sense of dissatisfaction; what do we really want?"
Critique of
Pure Sunshine
"Bye-Bye Happiness, I Think
I'm Gonna Die." -- The Everly Brothers
Insights can be unsettling, sobering, and
wondrous -- all three at once. That is what it feels like to perceive
deeply that the good has no reality apart from the bad, that the two
are joined at the hip. The perception is unsettling because it
undermines our hope for a happy life, free of hardships and woes.
A person who concludes that a happy life
is not possible, because the conditions are not right, will either
feel anxious -- if he still has hope -- or depressed -- if he has lost
hope. But to realize that even under the best of circumstances,
happiness is not attainable, because the problem is intrinsic to the
nature of happiness itself, is deeply unsettling and disorienting. It
is disorienting because one's guiding star, the pursuit of happiness,
no longer shines so brightly. A person might still seek to be happier,
but "happier" pales before one's original inner image of an
everlasting and unalloyed state of perfect happiness, the happiness
suggested in the 1930's song, Blue Skies. When there are "nothing
but blue skies," suffering soon returns in the form of a restless
boredom. Shakespeare's Prince Hal observes: "Nothing is more
unendurable than a succession of sunny days." But this is the
very thing that most people earnestly, and naively, seek.
The Monster
Returns!
One of the salient features of modern
life is the effort to deny the inseparability of these polar
opposites, the good and the bad. This is seen in the attempt to have
sex without the responsibilities that result from procreation, to have
money without work, to create without having to clean up the
consequent mess that is intrinsic to creation; in other words, to
divide the part of life that we want from the part that we do not
want.
For example, since the negative dimension
of acquiring things is paying for them, a person may seek to separate
the good (buying) from the bad (paying) by means of a credit card, or
in the case of the government, by means of deficit spending. When the
bad returns, it usually returns with a wallop. It is as if the bad
were lonely, and comes rushing back to join its missing half, the
good.
Much of modern life involves efforts to
keep the good while transferring the bad to someone else. It is as if
we were involved with a giant game of "hot potato," or
"tag, you're it." The gods on Mount Olympus daily witness
the comical spectacle of humans scurrying around, trying to reap
life's benefits, while sneaking the bill into the other fellow's
pocket.
The advance of technology is, to a large
extent, driven by this effort to enjoy the goods of life without
experiencing a concomitant bad. We can have heat and hot water, for
example, without having to chop wood and fetch water. But not chopping
wood means we become flabby, we do not appreciate the warmth of our
house nearly as much, and of course there is the fuel bill.
Technology has caused the negative to
transform in a more frightening way, creating problems of a global
magnitude. These include: air and water pollution, the greenhouse
effect, the threat of nuclear and chemical warfare -- to say nothing
of traffic jams, minds weakened from excessive television watching, an
alienating loss of contact with life's fundamental realities,
etcetera. This is not an argument against technology; our concern here
is to explore how the effort to be free of the bad causes the bad to
return in new and monstrous forms.
Another example of the effort to separate
the good from the bad is "positive thinking." Motivational
speakers are the evangelists of positive thinking, but the gospel is
also espoused by everyone from athletic coaches to business leaders.
Here is a religion in which negative thoughts are anathematized.
Negative thoughts are the product of self-doubt. And self doubt is the
voice of the devil.
Authentic self-doubt springs from genuine
insight about the nature of egocentricity, selfhood, and the meaning
of life. What we see about ourselves at such moments is often
difficult to face. But evolution to higher levels of consciousness is
not possible without self-doubt. To flee from self-doubt by means of
the self-lobotomy called positive thinking is a sure sign of
desperation, both for a person and for a nation.
Good and bad, positive and negative,
happiness and sadness, are all correlative. They are no more separable
than up and down, or right and left, or heads and tails. The effort to
have the good without the bad merely causes the bad to shift its shape
and suffering to be conserved.
Giving Two
Impostors the Bum's Rush
"If you can meet with
Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors
just the same" -- Kipling
It is quite sobering to realize that good
and bad are interdependent, making it impossible to attain
"nothing but blue skies." Paradoxically, this realization,
rather than being heavy, is liberating. It makes you feel lighter and
happier. That is because, at the moment when false expectations
depart, so does the anxiety that you might miss your chance for
happiness and the depression over having missed it. This is a great
relief!
If you will daily contemplate the true
relation of good and bad, you will begin to feel a rare peace of mind,
owing to your unattachment from your ceaseless striving, contending,
worry, and strife. It is our purpose, in this and coming chapters, to
help you realize what is necessary for the attainment of this inner
peace.
Now, you may think that we are
recommending that you accept your status as a limited, finite, mortal
creature enmeshed in a life of trade-offs, that you must realize that
you can not have it all, accept the good with the bad, that you
grow-up and give up. This is not what we are recommending! Shrinking
or settling is a degeneration of spirit. The longing for being,
fulfillment, happiness, the infinite, can never really be abandoned.
But we can change the level on which we seek fulfillment. To get to a
new level, requires that we clarify our desires.
It is vital, then, that we answer
Epictetus' question, and discover what is really lacking. Only by
answering this question can we finally attain that for which we have
been longing. We must continue on our detective adventure, hot on the
trail of the elusive shape-shifter of human suffering.
The Void
Within
We have seen that when the bad departs,
the good follows suit. What happens then? The lack returns, but in a
new form. As the satisfaction of entering a warm house diminishes, we
may search for something to eat, even if we are not really hungry. As
the pleasure of eating palls, we are restless for distraction. This
perception led Schopenhauer to propose that lack is what is most
fundamental to human existence.
Schopenhauer suggests that each person
has within him something akin to a void, a void which must be filled
with suffering. We solve a major problem, and the void is immediately
refilled, since nature abhors a vacuum. The void might be filled with
a number of smaller problems, but filled it must be.
Schopenhauer's metaphor of an inner void
is useful, since it calls our attention to a fundamental reality of
human existence. But his metaphor still leaves unanswered the
question: "What are we lacking?"
From Cosmic
Hunger to Concrete Desires
We are involved here in an unusual
enterprise: a self-conscious inquiry into "what is lacking."
It is important that we distinguish this self-conscious search from
the usual unreflective type of search continually undertaken by the
mind. We are all involved in an unreflective search, whether or not we
realize it. Nor do we have any choice but to carry on this search. Our
unremitting hunger for something -- we know not what -- drives us on.
Our search for what is lacking might be envisioned as a hamburger, the
ideal mate, a new career, or perhaps a new world order. Then,
enraptured by this image, off we go in pursuit of the hitherto obscure
object of desire.
Consider an analogy. Freud stated that
anxiety is formless or "free floating." Anxiety presents a
threat to your existence, one you are unable to fend off in a
practical fashion. If you are anxious over the inevitability of death,
or the threat of meaninglessness, what can you do? An unlisted
telephone number or health insurance will not save you from
meaninglessness. Freud said that we transform such anxieties into
fear. Fear is a threat to our existence with a particular shape.
Therefore, fear is manageable. If you fear snakes on your property,
you can build a fence around it. If you fear flying in a plane, you
can take the bus.
The negativity we are discussing is more
fundamental than anxiety. Anxiety is a threat to our
"being." This original negativity has the character not of a
threat, but of an ever-present hunger.
Like anxiety, the primordial negativity
or lack is formless, shapeless, inchoate. If this underlying
negativity remains indeterminate, it is ungraspable. You are probably
familiar with those moments when you find yourself restless, but have
no idea what you wish to do. You are bored, but not bored with
anything in particular. You are longing for something, but have no
idea what it is. You long to be in desire, for desire is always
directed towards an object.
How does the mind respond to this painful
cosmic hunger? Just as the mind seeks to transform anxiety into fear,
it seeks to transform the primordial and indeterminate sense of lack
into concrete desires. It seeks to determine what is missing, in the
hope that this painful hunger may be satisfied. Consequently, the
primordial lack is transformed into any of a thousand and one images.
Each is a picture, or representation, of what we perceive to be
fundamentally lacking. Thus is born the great variety of human
desires. We then have an object for our hunger.
Desire, in turn, is the parent of the
legion of cravings, fears, quandaries, griefs, frustrations, and
terrors -- all the forms of misery -- that plague us. Consider the
human condition. We lust after what we do not have, fearful that we
might not be able to acquire it, or disappointed that we failed to
acquire it, or jealous of someone else who got it. We worry that we
will lose what we already have, or are grieved that we actually did
lose it, or are disappointed that what we wanted turned out to be
empty. The Buddha said that everything, the entire world, is on fire!
It is burning from the heat of desire.
And what is the source of all our
suffering? What we think is lacking is not what is truly lacking.
Consequently, we are driven in dizzying circles by the whirlwind of
endless desires, never finding and satisfying the source of all
desire, our fundamental hunger. So we are back to our question:
"What are we lacking?"
I've Been
Expecting You, Mr. Bond
Our search for the ground of the negative
requires the collection of clues and the identification of a culprit,
as in any other detective or spy story. We, like James Bond, are on a
mission to find "Mr. Big." At first we only encounter Mr.
Big's soldiers or henchmen. These are the legion of particular
negativities that we encounter in life. If we spend our time, as most
people do, battling with life's particular problems, we never win, for
Mr. Big has endless numbers of soldiers at his command.
If we are unable to cut through
appearances, to perceive the true nature of this protean monster, a
hopeless war of attrition ensues, and we die of exhaustion. This is
the usual pathetic scenario for human existence. The heroic
alternative is to find the elusive Mr. Big, and discover his true
identity. If we are to be free of suffering, we must look beyond
suffering's myriad expressions, and see the essential negativity.
But how can we know the ultimate lack if
it is formless and characterless? It is possible for us to
"read" our delusive images. By reading these images, we mean
penetrating the depths of our various desires and difficulties to see
what it is that we really want. This is comparable to finding and
confronting Mr. Big's higher-ups, our more fundamental formulations of
life's negativities.
What is a more fundamental formulation?
It is to see, for example, that your romantic difficulties result, not
from the flaws or faults of your partner, but from the way you relate
to the opposite sex, no matter who he or she may be. Deeper still is
to see that the problem lies in the nature of erotic union in general.
Each formulation or, to continue our analogy, each higher ranking
officer, seems to be more dangerous than the last. You realize, in
other words, that the problem runs more deeply than you expected.
It is one thing to perceive that your
difficulties are due to the war between the sexes. It is quite another
to perceive that your difficulties stem from contradictory
requirements of selfhood. In the first case, you might attempt to work
out new arrangements of male and female union. But if you see that
erotic problems are a species of a fundamental negativity -- one
cutting to the core of human existence -- you realize that you are
faced with a far more difficult question.
If you manage to survive each
successively more powerful opponent, you enter into the most dangerous
region, a place where no ordinary mortal dares set foot. You enter the
inner sanctum of Mr. Big, or to use a more classical analogy, into the
center of the maze, where you encounter the Minotaur. If you survive
this encounter, you will finally come to know the answer to Epictetus'
question. And, you will have overcome your suffering.
Mission:
Impossible
How are we to begin our search for Mr.
Big? If we become self-conscious of our desires, we see that the
exchange of troubles at the core of our being -- to use
Schopenhaurer's analogy -- is not arbitrary. There is a logic to the
sequence of shapes that the negative assumes. To read this logic would
be comparable to deciphering the code that determines the shape of
human suffering. Here, we offer an overview of what we mean by this
deciphering effort; in later chapters, we will go into detail.
Examining our life, we perceive that our
solutions to previous problems are often the very source of our
present difficulties! How startling, indeed how downright sublime, to
catch the Proteus of human suffering in the midst of his
transformations! Here are a few examples: Psychoanalysis, in freeing
us from feelings of guilt, has saddled us with the problem of
meaninglessness; having becoming a responsible person we now no longer
feel carefree; having managed to escape the kinds of conflicts that
our parents experience in their relationship, we have become saddled
with problems endemic to our kind of marriage. It takes some time to
recognize the haunting connection between present problems and those
we have solved.
We may suspect that solving one problem
simply causes another one to appear, but this does not mean we give up
on finding a solution. Economists know, for example, that raising the
tax rate initially brings in more revenue, but, in fact, it may
ultimately shrink revenue when marginal businesses become insolvent.
Still they hope to finesse the delicate balances in the economy.
Puzzles and games can symbolically
picture to the mind our effort to "get it together." There
are certain puzzles in which, if we get one piece in order, we may
cause another piece to be out of place. Such puzzles dramatize this
dilemma: if we are not careful in our solution, the negative will
reappear somewhere else in our life. There is a sense that although a
solution is difficult to effectuate, it is possible.
The Rubik's Cube puzzle accords with our
a priori sense that life starts out "whole," and that
somehow it all gets disarranged. The primordial unity is symbolized by
each of the colors being in place. The blues are on one side, the reds
on another, greens on a third and so on. The jumbling of the cubes has
a mythic significance. It symbolizes life hopelessly mixed up in a
multiplicity, a chaos, or just a mess.
It is akin to what happens in the
philosopher Anaximander's cosmogony. There is an original unity
called, "The Boundless." Out of the Boundless emerge the
four elements: earth, air, fire and water. Then these elements fight
with each other, creating strife and chaos. The nursery rhyme, Humpty
Dumpty, tells the same story. The One, the original cosmic egg, falls
and splinters and splatters into a hopelessly disunified mess.
Whether the truth is told cosmologically,
mythically, in a puzzle, or in a children's nursery rhyme, it is the
same story. We start out whole; life becomes a mess. Somehow it must
come together again if we are to inhabit a universe, and not a chaos
of conflicting opposites.
What is the driving force of your life?
Is it not the assumption that you can "get it together?" If
you run into difficulties, you think that you must work harder or that
you need to be more clever. You are confident that you have a
solution, but then you realize that your new solution has caused --
continuing our Rubik's Cube analogy -- one of the colors to be
misplaced. You realize that you do not have it together. You succeeded
in getting your mother-in-law to vacate your premises, but now you
have no one to babysit. The result is that your suffering is
conserved. But "hope springs eternal;" you remain confident,
and try again.
Over time, the dark thought may come to
you that pertinacious efforts to make life work are to no avail. This
is because in life, unlike in Rubik's Cube, it is not simply a matter
of difficulty in getting it together, in bringing the conflicting
opposites into a unity. You suspect that it cannot be unified at all,
that what you are attempting to accomplish in life is simply
contradictory.
Human life is riddled with contradiction.
For example, women are often required by men to be feminine,
unreflective, and immediate. But they are then criticized if they are
not also self-directed, reflective and responsible. And they are urged
to be both ways, not alternately, but simultaneously. Likewise, men
are often urged to be strong and directive, but they also are asked to
show feelings -- and to be both ways simultaneously. The task that men
and women demand of each other is no more possible than, while
driving, to make a left turn and a right turn at the same time. The
contradictions that appear in relationships are but a species of an
ultimate contradiction, which we have yet to explore.
Could it be that the game that we have
been handed to play, at birth, is a contradiction? Will there always
be Rubik's cubes out of order? Must all attempts at a solution merely
alter the form that suffering takes? Is man's effort to find
self-fulfillment really a "mission impossible?" For
existentialists, such as Jean Paul-Sartre, the answer to these
questions is a dreadful "yes." We shall explore Sartre's
conclusions, in more detail, in subsequent chapters. But let us
assume, for the moment, that Sartre was correct in his dark assessment
of the human condition. Where, then, lies the road beyond
existentialism?
The Road
Paved with Paradoxes
The boon of self-knowledge turns out to
be quite different than what you may initially hope it will be. It
doesn't give you "an answer." On the contrary, it questions
the answer that you are already living and which is not proving
satisfactory. An "answer" is an inner image of what you hope
would bring you fulfillment. It is an image that guides everything you
do. It is the hidden blueprint of your life.
Examining this blueprint allows you to
clearly know if your answer can succeed, or whether it is founded on a
contradiction. Perceiving that your answer is contradictory allows you
to let go of it. Nothing is more liberating than abandoning a
"mission impossible." Here, then, is life's great paradox.
The perception that what you are attempting to accomplish is
impossible -- because it is predicated on a contradiction -- elevates
your awareness to a level beyond the contradiction, and therefore
beyond despair. The silver, that can be found lining every cloud, is
liberating Self-knowledge. Here, then, lies the path beyond
existentialism.
What was broadly outlined in this
introductory chapter will be brought into sharper focus, beginning in
Part II. There we shall explore how The Conservation of Suffering
Principle operates in specific contexts, such as erotic love,
economics and psychotherapy. But, before doing so, we must unmask the
shape-shifter of human suffering! In the next few chapters, we shall
discover the basic contradiction that lies at the root of all
suffering.