BEYOND THE FOURTH WAY
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Euphoria


If it is true--and everybody knows it--that you learn from
your mistakes and experience is the great teacher, why don't more
men and women advancing into maturity and beyond end up with
great wisdom rather than a great accumulation of psychic scar
tissue? We all get our quota of experience and make enough
mistakes to become wizards. Sooner or later, no matter what
shelter people may seek, life looks them up and knocks the
daylights out of them. One can see the records of life's
heavy-handed experience in the faces and figures of the old along
with an unspoken hope that they will be spared any more uncalled
for raps on the knuckles in life's savage classroom.

But when do the final degrees in wisdom get handed out?

It is said that drowners get a glimpse of their entire
lifespans, and some who have lived through such near-death
experiences have confirmed such visions. But if Death is the
Great Teacher who whispers too late the answers, of what use is
that to us?

Physical and emotional pain, like the harbingers of death,
can lay us low and make us reluctant to pick ourselves up once
again. At such a point, isn't there some lesson we can learn to
prevent it from all happening the same way again? And why do so
many of us stumble from one catastrophe to the next without
profit of even the smallest increment of useful knowledge?

It is not difficult to see how other people are fooling
themselves while heading full-throttle toward an inevitable crash
with life. And others can, behind our back or occasionally to our
face, tell us what they see looming ahead for us, if we don't
alter course. But as prophets we seem blind to our own lives.

The Grand Denial

The lessons of experience and failure are there, plain to
see, but we do not learn. We repeat our mistakes. Why? Well,
learning is painful and has always been so. We imagine that it is
less painful simply to wipe the slate clean in our memories and
venture out again as though for the first time and hope that this
time everything will work out--like in a fairy tale maybe?

Thus Euphoria, the eternal faith of the optimistic mortal.
When pain of negative emotion plunges us back into ourselves,
alone and hurting and responsible for doing it to ourselves,
Personality seeks to flee the pain. It does not want to learn
that it is the cause of the pain, or to accept any part in it.
All Personality knows is that it has been here before--rolled
down to the bottom of the mountain like Sisyphus, flattened,
hurting, stopped cold.

What can be done? One option requires acceptance of the pain
and increasing responsibility for self. But that option is not
very enticing to Personality. It appears like a tunnel of Despair
with light, no hope, in view until and unless Personality
changes.

And the other option?

Euphoria! A brand-new flight to a brand-new destination! The
brain is ordered to cone up with a new idea, find some escapist
activity that has always worked before, or maybe something one
has always wanted to try. Sign up for that self-improvement
course, hitch your wagon to a new star--a new cause, a new
candidate. Save the planet, save the whales, create a non-
dangerous universe through stronger legislation. Or maybe it's a
new group studying Tibetan Buddhism. A new workout or a new gym.
A bridge club you dropped out of. A weekend in Vegas. It can be
short-term: a detective novel, a movie, a TV program, a series of
diversionary activities. Personality is resourceful, and the
glittery world obliging. Anything to escape the pain--from the
Grand Tour to a makeover. A night out with the boys or the girls,
or orgasm with a different type. But speed is essential, for the
pain is heavy and escape velocity is needed.

Always a Maiden Voyage

Whatever ticket one has bought, it's time to strap oneself
in and wait for that exhilarating instant of takeoff. Suddenly
one is soaring! Pain is gone! The world isn't such a bad place
after all! The glider sails effortlessly over the landscape, and
it's all virgin territory. One has never been here before.

Erased is all memory of previous flights, you see. This is
the maiden voyage. The hills and streams and little villages pass
by far below, with little people lost in the maze, while one
lifts with the wind beyond the flat horizon to view the stars.
Now Personality's wings are buoyed by the breezes of positive
emotions: joy, love, romance, excitement, glamour, endless
novelty,

The glider doesn't know that it is not traveling under its
own power, that sooner or later it must return to earth. And the
getaway brochures fail to mention that inevitability.

Suddenly the bottom drops out of the cocktail party, and the
clever conversation has the hollow tinny sound of futility. The
lover grows cold before one's eyes and the morning-after coffee
tastes bitter. The new group of friends turns out to be just like
the old group one had such a hard time getting free of.

The winds have died, and the tender craft is plunging down
in a tailspin toward a landscape looming larger and more horribly
familiar every second.

Forced Descent

This is the inevitable second stage of Euphoria--Forced
Descent...

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Euphoria



BEYOND THE FOURTH WAY
https://fifthway.tripod.com/home.htm