Page 50 - WhoAreWe...

Everyone needs to spend the time and energy to ask
themselves if a particular pleasure is socially destructive or
not. If it is, then simply find other ways to experience
pleasure that do not include harming other people. It's just
not that difficult to, for most of us anyway, and the result
will be a much, much better world that include more
spiritual growth for all.

I think that it is also important, as we look deeper into
where pleasures may come from, to try to describe what I
consider the importance of discerning pleasures by their
levels of significance to our lives. You may be thinking
what? Pleasure is pleasure, isn't it? No, I do not think so
and being aware of these distinctions can only help us as
we work to rid ourselves of the wrong kind of pleasures,
the destructive ones. So, I believe that there are different
levels of significance of pleasure. This was another concept
that I had loosely considered and which Scott Peck's work
crystallized for me to and I thank him endlessly for doing
that. Let us look a little deeper.

Sex, enjoying a trip to Disneyland, eating good food,
stimulants like alcohol and drugs, the pure thrill of meeting
someone new, all of these things and more can provide
instant pleasure, as we all know. But I would maintain that
these pleasures, though very nice and quite valid and
necessary for the most part, are superficial pleasures, only
last so long, and are not the deep, life-lasting pleasure that
we derive from truly doing our job, which is to promote
positive energy throughout the universe through spiritual
growth and enlightenment. These are the ones we need to
pay the closest attention to because they have such a huge
effect on our lives, and everyone around us.

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