What happened to "love?" What happened to "oneness," goodness, unity, God being in His heaven and all being right with the world? What happened to all the consciousness raising that was supposed to be going on all over the planet? What happened to being "safe" if you surrounded yourself with "love and light" and positive thinking? Over and over again I was shown that these things were merely masks of the "feeding machine." There is layer after layer of illusions.
Of course, the question arose: had I studied the darkness so long that I had fallen into it? Was my effort to eradicate the lies and confusion really an admission of their existence that then caused them to manifest in my life? Was I seeing a mirror of myself? At that point I read in William James' Varieties of Religious Experience:
"At our last meeting, we considered the healthy-minded temperament, the temperament which has a constitutional incapacity for prolonged suffering, and in which the tendency to see things optimistically is like a water of crystallization in which the individual's character is set. We saw how this temperament may become the basis for a peculiar type of religion, a religion in which good, even the good of this world's life, is regarded as the essential thing for a rational being to attend to. This religion directs him to settle his scores with the more evil aspects of the universe by systematically declining to lay them to heart or make much of them, by ignoring them in his reflective calculations, or even, on occasion, by denying them outright. Evil is a disease and worry about evil is a disease in itself. Even repentance and remorse.. may be but sickly impulses.
"Let us now... turn towards those persons who cannot so swiftly throw off the burden of the consciousness of evil, but are congenitally fated to suffer from its presence. ...there are different levels of the morbid mind... there are people for whom evil means only a maladjustment with things, a wrong correspondence of one's life with the environment. Such evil as this is curable... by either modifying the self or the things or both at once. There are others for whom evil is... a wrongness or vice in [their] essential structure, which no alteration in the environment, or any superficial rearrangement of the inner self, can cure, and which requires a supernatural remedy. On the whole, the Latin races have leaned more towards the former way of looking upon evil, ...while the Germanic races have tended rather to think of Sin in the singular, and with a capital S, as of something ineradicably ingrained in our natural subjectivity, and never to be removed by any superficial piecemeal operations.
"...we speak of the threshold of a man's consciousness in general, to indicate the amount of noise, pressure, or other outer stimulus which it takes to arouse his attention at all. One with a high threshold will doze through an amount of racket by which one with a low threshold would be immediately waked. Similarly, when one is sensitive to small differences in any order of sensation, we say he has a low 'difference threshold.' His mind easily steps over it into the consciousness of the differences in question. And just so we might speak of a 'pain threshold' a 'fear threshold,' a 'misery threshold,' and find it quickly overpassed by the consciousness of some individuals, but lying too high in others to be reached by their consciousness.
"Goethe [expressed] 'I will say nothing against the course of my existence. But at the bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.'
"And Martin Luther said: 'I am utterly weary of life. I pray the Lord will come forthwith and carry me hence... rather than live forty years more, I would give up my chance of Paradise.'
"The only relief that 'healthy mindedness' can give is: 'Stuff and nonsense! Get out into the open air! Cheer up, you'll be all right if you will only drop your morbidness!' But, to ascribe spiritual value to mere happy-go-lucky contentment is but the very consecration of forgetfulness and superficiality. Our troubles are that we CAN die, that we CAN be ill, that we ... need a life not correlated with death, a health not laible to illness, a good that will not perish... said a friend: 'The trouble with me is that I believe too much in happiness and goodness and nothing can console me for their transiency.'
"[And so those who experience] a little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little descent of the pain threshold, brings the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turns us into melancholy metaphysicians.
"Conceive yourself, if possible, suddenly stripped of all the emotion with which your world now inspires you and try to imagine it as it exists, purely by itself, without your favorable, hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almost impossible for you to realize such a condition of negativity and deadness. Whatever of value, interest, or meaning our world may appear endued with are pure gifts of the spectator's mind. [For example] love transforms the creature loved as utterly as the sunrise transforms Mont Blanc from a corpse-like gray to a rosy enchantment. [So with our emotions] if they are there, life changes. [This alone should tell us how easily our emotions can be used to control or hypnotize us!]
"In Tolstoy's case the sense that life had any meaning whatever was for a time wholly withdrawn. The result was a transformation in the whole expression of reality. When we study the phenomenon of regeneration, we shall see that a not infrequent consequence of the change is a transfiguration of the face of nature in his eyes. ...An urgent wondering and questioning is set up, a poring theoretic activity, and in the desperate effort to get into right relation with the matter, the sufferer is often led to a solution...
p>"Tolstoy writes: '...I was neither insane nor ill. On the contrary, I possessed a physical and mental strength which I have rarely met in persons of my age. I could mow as well as the peasants, I could work with my brain eight hours uninterruptedly and feel no bad effects. And yet I could give no reasonable meaning to any actions of my life. And I was surprised that I had not understood this from the very beginning. My state of mind was as if some wicked and stupid jest was being played upon me by someone. One can live only so long as one is intoxicated, drunk with life but when one grows sober one cannot fail to see that it is all a stupid cheat. What is truest about it is that there is nothing even funny or silly in it; it is cruel and stupid, purely and simply. But perhaps, I said to myself, there may be something I have failed to notice or to comprehend. it is not possible that this condition of despair should be natural to mankind. And I sought for an explanaton in all the branches of knowledge acquired by men. I questioned painfully and protractedly and with no idle curiosity. I sought, not with indolence, but laboriously and obstinately for days and nights on end. I sought like a man who is lost and seeks to save himself - and I found nothing. I became convinced, moreover, that all those who before me had sought for an answer in the sciences have also found nothing. And not only this, but that they have recognized that the very thing which was leading me to despair - the meaningless absurdity of life - is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man.'
"The only thing that need interest us now is the phenomenon of this absolute disenchantment with ordinary life... when disillusionment has gone as far as this, when one has tasted of the fruit of the tree, and the happiness of Eden never comes again... the only happiness that then can come is something vastly more complex, including natural evil as one of its elements. The sufferer is born again as a deeper kind of conscious being than he could be before.
"Having arrived at this point, we can see the antagonism that must arise between the 'healthy-minded' optimist and the morbid-minded who take the experience of viewing evil as essential. To the latter, 'healthy-mindedness' seems unspeakably blind and shallow. To the former, the latter seems seems unmanly and diseased. They believe that there is something almost obscene about these children of wrath and cravers of a second birth. And, if religious intolerance, hanging and burning at the stake, were still in vogue, there is little doubt that the 'healthy-minded' would advocate the destruction of the morbid minded rather than the other way around.
"The method of averting one's attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. ...yet there is no doubt that 'healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and these evil facts may be, after all, the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.
"The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. To believe in the carnivorous reptiles of geologic times is hard for our imagination - they seem too much like museum specimens. Yet there is no tooth in any one of those museum skulls that did not daily hold fast to the body struggling in despair of some fated living victim. Forms of horror just as dreadful to the victims fill the world about us today. Here, on our very hearths, the infernal cat plays with the panting mouse or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws. Crocodiles, pythons and rattlesnakes are vessels of life as real as we are; and whenever they or other wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which the morbid minded feels is the literally right reaction to the situation.
"...Since the evil facts are as genuine parts of nature as the good ones, and our philosophic presumption should be that they have some rational significance, then systematic failure to accord these things active attention is less complete than those systems that attempt to include these elements in their scope. The 'healthy-minded optimists only need to be born once, but the 'sick souls' need to be born twice to be happy.
[Laura's note: The result is two different conceptions of the universe: subjective and objecfive.]
"In the once born, the world is a one-storied affair... whose parts have just the values which they appear to have... [to the twice born] the world is a double-storied mystery. Natural good is not simply insufficient in amount and transient, there lurks a falsity in its very being. It keeps us from our real good and renunciation and despair of it are our first step in the direction of the truth. There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual and we must lose the one before we can participate in the other."
Would that still be a trick from the bad guys? 
