Birth and Rebirth: The Awakening of a Dormant Spirit

Copyright © 2013 John Stanley Mackow.

Author photo by David LaPorte Photography

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Abbott Press books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

Abbott Press

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.abbottpress.com

Phone: 1-866-697-5310

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4582-1335-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4582-1334-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4582-1333-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013922820

Abbott Press rev. date: 12/23/2013

CONTENTS

Chapter 1: The Concealed Aim of Desire

Chapter 2: The Manner Of Seeking

Chapter 3: Existence and God

Chapter 4: Creation and Evolution

Chapter 5: Meditation

Chapter 6: Heaven and Earth

References

I would like to express my deepest and sincerest gratitude to my brother and spiritual guide, Raja Singh, and to my dear friend and piano teacher, Don Louis Wetzel. Their patience and faith in me are an indispensable benefit and a much-cherished boon, and without their unconditional and unwavering support, the writing of this book would have been impossible. I am to them both deeply indebted.

CHAPTER 1

The Concealed Aim of Desire

From the very beginning, humans cannot help but be captivated with the world before them. Caught up in wonder, amazement, and profound curiosity, a child plays, explores, tastes, touches, and conceives all kinds of means of gathering more information about his or her surroundings. Children’s needs are very simple. They do not worry, for they are confident that their parents will provide. The thought of luxury and any kind of decadent enjoyment does not yet occur. If decadence is introduced from some adult source, children lack the capacity (or are too innocent) to fully understand or appreciate the suggestion. Children (insofar as they are typically oblivious to harsh realities) are, for the most part, content within themselves. Absorbed in self-derived bliss, their worldview is one of boundless fascination. With an unprejudiced ear, children feverishly listen to both true and fantastical stories. They imagine fiction to be real and even make a sort of fiction out of reality. In play, every child eagerly acts out scenarios and imposes reality onto things and into places where, to an adult, no life may exist. With robust enthusiasm, children happily seek to know more, incessantly ask questions, and always with an abundance of energy anxiously look to extend the reach of their experiences.

A deep, compelling need for exploring the world does not end with childhood, any more than learning ends with graduation from school. Ancient man looked to the horizon, and, emboldened by a determination to discover the territories that lay hidden just beyond what they could see, he set out to sail across treacherous seas. As they gazed into the heavens, early astronomers marveled and wondered what to make of the sky’s mysteries. Puzzled with the world’s labyrinthine nature and stunned by its many paradoxes, man has always determinedly ached after knowledge, needing to be sure of his own purpose and questioning if this short terrestrial existence was all there is to this life. Thus, man resolved to seek out explanations for the deepest of unknowns and supposed unknowables. Religions and their theogonic formations were developed out of such inner longings for higher understanding. Great spiritual teachers, by all initial appearances looking as if they were contesting the pantheons and assertions of the ancient polytheists, proclaimed that the world is a product of one God. They encouraged compassion and the love of fellow man and left an indelible impression on people’s hearts and minds. However, these noble dealings with matters of spirit did not excuse involvement in more common material concerns, for the realities of practical life also clamored for their share of attention. This constant struggle with the world’s day-to-day perplexities, coupled with the continued pressures for greater understanding, yielded places of higher learning. Together with the mounting challenges of maintaining social integrity, such struggles helped shape new legal and economic systems. Mankind, though, remains generally unsatisfied. People still search—as they always have—for more thorough explanations. By force of will, man has developed mathematics and science (and with them, more capable instruments) to look further and deeper into the cosmos. Man has used the same principles to extend his observations in the opposite direction, by penetrating into the very fabric of matter itself. In carrying out meticulous and carefully calculated processes, man has unveiled astounding truths, gained all kinds of power, and debunked hosts of long-standing myths. The quest continues to this day, and by all visible appearance, this quest will march hand in hand with time toward eternity.

Indeed, the vast and wide physical world provokes boundless fascination and offers endless possibilities for exploration, but no more limited is the equally vast inner world, the world of individual psychology: the objective infinity is mirrored by an equally infinite subjective reality. We like to casually suppose that some of man’s first attempts at explaining consciousness were linked to the primitive religions, that the gods somehow inspired it all, and that each principle or potential type of behavior was linked to, influenced by, or controlled by a specific god or godly power. As material science has made its strides and gains, man now has the inclination to think consciousness is a product of or derived somehow from matter. Observing our very own mental fluctuations, however, we see that the realm of the mind is one that is much more plastic and unpredictable than the apparently much more stable observable physical world. How could something so relatively unstable and even, at times, chaotic come from something so orderly and machine-like as Nature? Furthermore, within this rambling tumult of thinking, we persist in recognizing an individual identity, like a thread holding together as it were beads of thought that we wear as a sort of ego-necklace. Such a peculiar occurrence of stability amidst complete instability naturally begs a sufficient explanation. Conclusions are formed and the argument is made: consciousness must be a product of the soul, an entity projected by God and thrust into the material vehicle we call a body, also, though separately, created by God. Recent discoveries in quantum mechanics, on the other hand, clearly suggest a sort of chaotic instability underlying the formation of atoms. Hence, there might be reason to suspect that there indeed is an observable, principled connection between order and disorder. If observable Nature appears stable, and if underneath this guise of constancy there persists an unrelenting brew of chaos, any doubt that a cohabitation of order and disorder is at all possible should be eradicated. Perhaps God is no longer needed to explain away the inconsistency between body and soul. Clearly, there is now good reason to support a possible linkage—rooted in randomness—between matter and consciousness. And since science has rid man of many irrational superstitions in the past, it is only a matter of time before science will triumph here, as well. The opposing argument readily points out that quantum mechanics still does not explain why the dualistic phenomenon of order and stability should surface as a possibility. There is nothing yet to contradict the prospect that individuality could be held stable by God against a backdrop of unstable thought, just as God holds matter in order within a sea of subatomic randomness. It can further be suggested that if God supports order, God could just as well create suitable conditions supporting an emergence of disorder.

Stock markets, which we like to think are run by intelligent and stable human beings, have been (by some theorists) determined to be, for all practical purposes, unpredictable. There are mathematical models in place that investors use to protect against risk and volatility in the markets, but none offer a perfect predictability based on current stock prices, fiscal health, and company performance forecasts. Many are, in effect, based on and devised according to much well-established evidence of the market’s generally random nature and behavior. If we, given our intelligence, can collectively generate randomness within a certain ordered and closed structure like the stock market, there is no reason not to suppose that a higher intelligence (be it termed God or designated by some other moniker) cannot be capable of expressing through its intelligence an observable randomness that, for all we know, might be designed to fool us. Of course, stock market models have successfully dispensed with the human factor altogether, and that suggests that God may be inconsequential in the affairs of the world. Proponents of God, on the other hand, may point out that, just as it took humans to create a stock market, it takes God to create a world (even if He doesn’t seem to have been involved with it since its formation). The prompt rebuttal goes on to suggest the God-believer continually uses God as a convenient placeholder for anything currently unknown and that there must be an as yet unveiled material or energetic explanation for such things. This idea is then countered by suggesting that the limited mind of man cannot know what is contained in the mind of God. Hence, material explanations will be always insufficient, and man must resign himself to believing in Him. The unbeliever suggests that such an assertion is an equally valid reason for not believing in God. If God and His ways cannot be known in accordance with the ways we know everything else, He cannot, and maybe even should not, be believed in; we should only rest our faith on things that can be tested and incontrovertibly proven. Without this much-needed finality of proof, such arguing is disposed to go on endlessly.

Some may be inclined to think we were created by God or by some phantom supermaterial force and energy. Others believe that all Creation is a propitious coincidence, an inscrutable spasm with no indicating origin, a miraculous formation of absolutely nothing. Whatever humans may believe, the compiled data of material science has given cosmologists enough to formulate an opinion. Spontaneously and inexplicably, the initial conditions were set through a primal mega explosion. From this riotous maelstrom is unleashed an alphabet soup: somehow within the inchoate plasma that was early matter and amidst all the post-detonation havoc, there was achieved not only an impregnation of potential powering an ideational matrix of evolutionary possibility, but also the emergence of an unwitting arbiter for guiding this primordial flux according to a set of laws that permitted material formations to become, mutate, and react (however dumb and uncoordinated those reactions might have been) to the various shocks and collisions of the early universe. Eventually, these mutations became ever more subtle, and life emerged from matter. From this life, out of necessity and after great difficulty, from the continued shocks and struggles, animal consciousness and, finally, human consciousness emerged. Many of us think that all this came on account of nothing. Certainly, we may conclude that we are some eccentric creation of nothing—an accident or a lucky roll of the dice. Maybe this all is some deviant or uncommon course proceeding from a kind of nothing. Now, however, if not just for the very reason that we can entertain these notions, we can all readily agree that we are indeed something, and that something, for some reason, craves and needs to be satisfied.

Lofty philosophical musings, as they are often thought to be removed and distant, are easily dismissed as being practically inconsequential; they in no way alter the palpable actuality and immediate urgency of our physical, mental, and emotional needs. Our needs demand fulfillment. But, if we indeed all come from nothing, then all our fickle desires, too, must be dismissed as being nothing: our highest moral imperative should be the strictest practice of self-denial. The typical person will instinctively shudder at such a proposition. Perhaps he might even call it preposterous. Still, it is probably more preposterous that a scientist (who of course advocates for severe adherence to the scientific method) bent on disproving God and supporting a theory of nothingness as the foundation of our present human condition will shrink from putting the nothing theory to the ultimate test. These are the circumstances we now know and the facts as we perceive them, the atheist goes on to say, so, all mystery aside, we best take advantage of them while we are here and still have the chance. Thus, we submissively allow the impressions of our material situation to oppress us, and we unwittingly develop a deep, material prejudice. If we conclude that man (and hence his awareness) must be a product of material forces, and as we accept our material surroundings to be our natural and proper domain, it can only follow that we should expect all of our perpetual longings to be resolved via material means. As we labor to satisfy our physical needs, we find that we do not always get what we wish or what we think we deserve; as we try to indulge our mental and emotional cravings, we discover that they are often irreconcilably conflicted; as we pursue a general sense of satisfaction, we find a tangled array of bumpy roads that lead us to several places, but never to that one place that we vaguely recognize is our rightful destination. The life of material desire and its consummation in pleasure has its antipode in the form of suffering and strife.

All our lacking, whether it is physical, emotional, or mental, carries with it a great many practical difficulties. For all things there is a struggle and a great need for exertion, and with this struggle there is no guarantee that we will find an acceptable result. The formation of planets was a very messy affair and full of cataclysmic collisions; the raw materials themselves needed to have been ejected—the heavier elements even needing to have been synthesized—by the force of supernova explosions. There is no reason to suppose our struggles should be any different; as we well know, they often are extremely messy and tediously complicated. Right out of the gate we suffer: the mother must endure an excruciatingly painful process so that a baby can welcome the world not with joy, but with tears. Just as every galactic dust cloud that eventually coalesces into a planet or system of planets may not yield an earth harboring life as we know it, not every child will have the opportunity to grow into a fully mature, fully functioning, and happy adult. All kinds of disturbances and diseases loom—everything from depression to schizophrenia, the common cold to bacterial meningitis, diabetes to cryptogenic cirrhosis of the liver—and seem to exist for the sole purpose of making life miserable. These diseases appear to be barbarically ruthless and indiscriminate. So often they take lives tragically and prematurely: a mother may be tenderly nurturing her offspring today, only to discover her child discolored by the mark of terminal illness tomorrow. Such instances, as they may occur in our own lives, prompt an inner voice to speak up and cry foul. The mother, at least from what we may have observed, did care for her baby during pregnancy. What could she possibly have done to deserve such a nightmarish punishment? The baby, for that matter, didn’t even get an opportunity to commit any mistakes, so it seems impossible to question whether the baby’s situation is just and deserving. Life begins to look like a puzzle where none of the pieces are cut properly and refuse in any meaningful way to fit together. Even if somehow those pieces did fit, the realized picture would still be grotesque and not exactly heartwarming. Injustice appears everywhere in our world. Some people toil without rest never to attain what others receive with either blind luck or seemingly little effort. A car may hit and cripple a good person, whereas a bad person, via some sly and unscrupulous political maneuvering, may find a way to earn a promotion at work. One baby happens to be born into a rich family and has all the benefits and privileges of loving parents and unlimited resources; another baby happens to be born into abject poverty, lives under the most abhorrent of unsanitary conditions, and has drug-addict parents to boot. There cannot be a just God, if there is one in the first place, because the world does not look to include fairness as a variable in its equation.

Virtue seems to be rewarded only at the whim of some capricious cosmic force, but even then, the lack of virtue appears to attract equal, if not sometimes greater, reward. Our experiences often show that those most without virtue and those most eager to step over others earn the largest profit in this world. But, what is the true value of that supposed payout? Even if we acquire what we materially seek and secure the means to satisfy recurrent cravings, satiety, boredom, and a deeper restlessness might soon set in. Although there are many people blessed with a bounty of material success, so many of them can’t seem to ever pull the corners of their mouths up toward their ears. It is truly a peculiar aspect of the human condition that in life we should dwell on negative experiences and not fully appreciate the positive ones, and that having even more than we need or could ever require, we should remain unhappy and restless. Elsewhere, we all know that the specifics of those wants and needs that we individually amass according to our personalities and social situations can differ greatly. Few things are this obvious; we do not need an eminent psychologist to help us understand that what might make one person happy, might make another person miserable. Our efforts at quenching desires will often be thwarted. Some of us will harbor criminal intentions and seek to profit off of unassuming victims. Anger, greed, and lust—perversions that run contrary to the desired order of society—thus take a central role in the social dynamic. With each person blindly seeking his own individual satisfaction (those satisfactions sometimes requiring taking unfair advantage of others), conflicts are inevitable. Ideologies clash. Resources scatter and are unfairly distributed. Frustration builds. Hatred develops. Homicidal mayhem ensues.

As much as children generally are enthralled with the picture show that is the world, experienced adults likely will not share their rosy outlook. We can state rather confidently that most of life is a series of disappointments punctuated occasionally by fleeting moments of happiness—to live typically means to suffer. Paradoxically, we also harbor the sentiment that life is magnificent and indescribably beautiful. With an enduring conviction, some of us stubbornly seek a perfect realization of our dreams. But soiling such a deep wish for harmony and upsetting those intimate longings for delight is the soot of distress. We don’t have to be thrust into social upheaval to feel the nag of anxiety, nor do our lives need to be in imminent danger for us to live in fear. Even if we are lucky enough to find a certain high degree of happiness, as in perhaps a successful marriage, every negative emotion can work its way to the surface and eventually come to dominate. Money may be scarce, bills may not be paid, and we may lose our home. We may grow insecure in our relationship, become jealous, and worry over the possibility of a betrayal. Should we become aware that our employer intends to cut costs, the nagging threat of unemployment then hovers over us like a dark cloud. Even a person who has no problems in his personal life, a person who lives according to his conscience, who lives a life of self-restraint, and who is adequately content within his means, will find it difficult to stomach the world’s existing levels corruption. Though he may not suffer any personal tragedy, he may nonetheless grow to be completely disillusioned with this world. For such a person, it might be very difficult to even conceive of having children. He will certainly wonder what he might teach them about life, whether within the world’s foul stench of baseness and dishonesty there is hidden any inherent goodness at all. How might he live with himself, to selfishly start a family for some personal happiness, only for it all to come crashing down under the overwhelming weight of suffering and the unanswerable question of what it all is for? He himself not adequately prepared to handle life, he knowingly and willingly imposes the same prison sentence onto his progeny—those he loves most—by bringing them into this miserable world, and he upbraids himself for failing to equip them for the ordeals ahead. The more we honestly consider the facts of life and the more openly we reflect upon them, the more are we steered toward favoring the nothing theory over the God theory. Our earthly venture appears to offer us little positive return for our hefty investment.

Great tragedy works swiftly and independently of our wills; in the blink of an eye, a cold, callous Nature swallows up all we know and love into its abysmal, mysterious origins. At any time, at any moment a natural disaster may strike, terrorists may unleash their secret plot, or a malfunction may cause a plane to drop out of the sky. As soon as we discover that things can go wrong, as we mourn and lament their happening, we search out other things that may pose a threat in order to preemptively secure ourselves against them. As we discover just how many things actually can go wrong, it seems miraculous that anything actually works in any way at all. This is Nature, says religion, for nothing on God’s green Earth is perfect. This is Nature, say the scientists, for entropy is a fundamental law; from order to disorder, even the creation of order must net a greater amount of disorder, all is subject to corruption and must decay. And, for all we know, this might be the truth. The police may grow corrupt, so we erect a new, superior police force to police the original police. Then they grow corrupt, so we create another layer of law enforcement—and thereupon layer upon another layer until we run out of qualified people, go bankrupt, or degrade as a society to the point of complete chaos, thus fulfilling the prophesy of inevitable decay. If this is the way it is, paranoia is the most obvious and logical means for dealing with life, that is, assuming we want to survive for at least a little while longer. And amazingly we all still do, even though everything from rogue asteroids on a collision course with Earth to highly contagious strains of disease resistant to all known treatment to venomous spiders hiding out in shoes to a super-volcano seething beneath Yellowstone National Park can justify living in perpetual fear, anxiety, and doubt. Such threats seem as omnipresent as any supposed divine being—if not even more so—since the peace and love and happiness promised in scripture feel remote, alien, and perhaps even impossible, whereas suffering is acute, immediate, in every ounce of flesh, and in every perceptible facet of existence.

Still, in the thick of darkness and uncertainty, appearing as even the tiniest glimmer amidst a voiding despair and despondency, there has remained in the human sensibility a deep hope, an expectation that things may get better, that our most treasured desires may be rewarded, that our deepest sorrows will be forgotten, that we may find peace and happiness within ourselves and in the collective world order. But, what is this hope? How did it come to be so bold that it would vociferously speak out against the indifferent, material oppression? What is this bulwark of personality that stridently affirms itself against the vast, impersonal, cosmic ocean of space? Is this hope not insane? Really, it must be a kind of freak circumstance of Nature, for anything normal and sober would never dare to demand happiness when plain experience contradicts any such possibility. Maybe it is a vestige of the past, a subconscious projection from the ignorant and blissful happiness savored during childhood. Is it suggesting we suppress all the dark memories, all the disappointments and struggles of the past, and forcefully throw up a childlike innocence? Such assumed innocence can never be absolute; it would merely be an outer garment with our scars and their negative associations cloaked underneath. So, what is the purpose of hope? Is it not to torture us further? It will not permit us to accept the facts of existence as they appear, so is it not sadistically keeping us from realizing at least some peace? Why not be free? Why not go back to the nothing from whence we came? Why not end this nightmare and take our own lives? What is there to be afraid of, and why shouldn’t we face the truth? Why should we fear a few moments of intense physical pain when it might free us from prolonged misery? Why are we unwilling to do ourselves harm, and why should it stop us? Might it be because we despise suffering so much that we vehemently refuse to subject ourselves to more of it? But, how long can we honestly endure putting forward a cheerful image while quietly writhing in agony and desperation? Are we motivated to keep up the charade because beneath the weight of all our endured suffering we still love life? Did we really lose all expectation for its highest fulfillment? Do we not still hope to live? Or, why shouldn’t we resort to violence and commit suicide? Why shouldn’t we protest the tragedy in this world? And why shouldn’t we rebel against the indignity it breeds? Why can’t we grow out of all our childish hopes and favor instead a more mature hope for peace and rest in the great beyond?

As futile as its resistance may seem, hope has endured. As unlikely an outcome from the nescience of a blind, material substance it may be, hope is an existential reality; it must be admitted as something requiring further consideration. Nothing contradicts the possibility that hope might be connected to some deeper truth. Fundamentally, there is in hope a hinting at the solution to the deepest problem imposed upon humanity. The fact of hope, too, might support the time-old doctrine of all great religions: the teaching that we are made in the image of God.¹ Why should man be so offended by suffering if it were endemic to his nature, one derived from matter? Is it because we are truly Spirit, blissful and free, that we don’t consider all our blessings? Couldn’t any partial happiness derived from worldly things be too close to our true state and thus liable to be taken for granted? Couldn’t, then, the disappointments level so heavy a burden and so deep a shocking impression because they are effectively foreign? Could not our suffering be properly explained by our excessive identification with the body and its hosts of problems? Is it not possible that we forget our true nature by being swept up in the material shuffle? Given the ordeal that is this life, and given the fact that ideas about God, peace, and eternal joy continue to exist, how could it be so few of us even bother to seek out a deeper understanding of them? What keeps us from investigating why a supposition of us being made in God’s image exists (or could be made to exist) in the first place? And what keeps us from tangibly pursuing the image of God that is supposedly hiding somewhere within our fleshy encasements?

To the ordinary skeptic, any argument connecting the worldly fact of hope to the existence of God is at best a giant, uncorroborated leap, and at worst a gross oversimplification—a deflection of a serious philosophical debate into the childish fantasy land of wishful thinking. Following certain lines of thought, such skepticism may be justified. Still, there is too much within hope to dismiss the possibility entirely. The skeptic, maintaining that matter is the most fundamental fact, will go on to fervidly point out that consciousness arises from matter. But there is nothing, then, to conclusively demonstrate how or to answer why hope becomes a subjective aspect of human nature. Though in our superficial observations there are hints that suggest ways consciousness might arrange itself out of matter, there is nothing that might give us any idea why dense matter should allow for something as fine and subtle as consciousness to emerge out of it. Any arguments made on these points are just about purely speculative. Of course, the skeptic quickly can counter that argument by saying that it is equally speculative to link hope to God. As witness for the prosecution, the skeptic employs the current, well-established authority of science. As far as we can judge (when we view the world through our senses), it is true that matter appears to have come first and that life and consciousness must have developed later, but there is nothing to show how that matter (or some turbid quanta that would go on to form matter) might have come to be. In other words, the cause of the cause is unknown, so it is unfair to think some consciousness couldn’t have come first and, when in the mood, ignite a Big Bang (assuming this overwhelmingly popular theory is true, as it is dismissed by some scientists) the way we could casually light a fire. The skeptic will argue that such speculation also is absurd by contending that such things, being so far removed from our present reality, we will never and can never know. If we are to base our assessments on the assumption that matter is the ultimate fact, this is indeed quite true and cannot be disputed. If we then cannot offer credible proof for the existence of God, and if we cannot purge the mystery out of His methods, the skeptical position alone must stand triumphant and unassailable. But, even from a practical point of view, it really doesn’t matter whether the skeptic wins this round of debate or not. All philosophy and theory aside, we have in us a fundamental need for the Absolute. Whatever we think or believe, without possessing and knowing the Truth, we all really lose. One thing always remains certain: we are suffering; we are unhappy by way of longing and lacking, we are stressed by trial and tribulation, we are uncertain what tomorrow will bring, and, as we struggle not to drown in worry and fear, we have no legitimate clue what action it is we ultimately must take. Based on our current understanding, our situation will only remain in this woeful condition—or maybe even get worse—until either this issue of Truth or the principle upon which this issue hinges is absolutely, once and for all resolved.

Together, as individuals and as a collective humanity, we find ourselves caught in a pitiful position. We are in many ways like a dog that chases after its own tail: politicians solve one problem only to create another; scientists solve one riddle only to reveal scores of others; intellectuals work through one technicality only to be tripped up again later; in fulfilling one desire we give birth to many more. By making transportation easier, cars are indeed a time-saver, but we all can agree that there is nothing convenient or efficient about enduring gridlock traffic. Pesticides serve to protect the harvest, but we, too, must finally ingest that poison; inevitably, vermin also develop a resistance to the pesticide, and we are forced to readapt. Most importantly, all of humanity’s collective actions—however well-intentioned—have neither brought peace to us as individuals nor to the Earth as a whole. Our civilization is in as dire a situation today as it ever was yesterday. Our current problems do not differ from the problems of former times: they merely have changed garments to suit the modern trends in fashion. Philosophers may have inspired political action, and scientists may have made our lives more comfortable, but they have not solved the complex problem of life, nor have they found a practical method for bringing a touch of harmony to an otherwise impossibly discordant world. Existence remains an enigma. Uncertainty always weighs heavily upon our breast. Desire, that perpetual irritant, makes us quiver with restlessness. There is this desire, but there is never any satisfaction. Of all the rare jewels and gems and metals and commodities that people seek, none is so rare as that one, materially intangible possession that is happiness. Only a very lucky few can be said to truly possess it.

Why hope, love, and a will toward happiness should exist in any way warrants a proper and determined investigation. Skepticism, although it is a denial and naturally negative, is not necessarily objectionable. A certain amount of skepticism as a push toward further understanding and as a means for carrying out any study is helpful. However, to be merely skeptical for the sake of being skeptical without exercising any gumption toward solving the inquiry is pure vanity. Behind every skepticism there is want, and to be self-satisfied by a sort of resigned agnosticism—that there are certain questions that we cannot answer—is to remain deeply disturbed. Humanity as a whole—skeptic or not, believer or unbeliever alike—suffers from desire. This sheer fact of desire underscores a perpetual need, a fundamental lacking, a sort of immediate poverty (or even depravity) that tears at our inertial tendencies and compels us to action, but where exactly this action needs to be directed and how it is best implemented are the pivotal questions.

Hope is the bedrock of a true spiritual search, and it is the degree that we need lasting happiness that drives our search along. We seek to be like the child in his blissful ignorance, but without the ignorance, for if we revel in the light of a complete,