If ambition
drives you to use music, drugs and/or drinks to get you into the swing of
things, you cross the forbidden threshold again to be drawn into still greater
emptiness and despair. A wordless terror waits. Again and again, you rebel
against the very system meant to save you. You could rebel against material
things too. Work and study you must, but surely not for the power and the
glory.
But let's
say you "arrive," you fulfill all your dreams, what then? You will be
overwhelmed with a feeling of "what's the use?" A morbid feeling of
despair will overcome you. There won't be any more challenges to distract you
or lure you on. You will feel as though you have sinned, and somehow work is to
blame for it. Changing the subject of your studies, your job, or the object of
your striving may help, but only for a moment. Your mind begins to play tricks
on you. It might tell you, for instance, that you must try harder, use more
imagination to overcome your feeling of failure. "Well-meaning"
friends also get into the act and reaffirm the belief that your great potential
is yet to be realized—perhaps you should give up business and become a monk.
If you fall
for that line, you will fail to see that the sole reason for your problem is
trying. Now, using challenges, imaginary or otherwise, to provide the energy,
you once again involve yourself resentfully in the struggle to evolve what you
think to be your true self. But at last, when you see the fruit of your
struggle for what it is, failure, you tend to give up and resign yourself to
the "truth" —you're a failure, a dummy, a drunk, or whatever. You
may now even make use of your surrender to frustrate the motivators who have
been pushing you to be a success. Making people fail in their effort to save
you can become a goal in itself.
Why Work? What Is There To Live For? Why Is Everything So
Futile?
The truth
about anything can be discerned, if not through foresight, then in hindsight,
through experience. The truth you will come to realize in this situation is
that whenever you use work to build your ego, you are breeding the failure and
futility that you have been seeking to overcome through your self-serving
labor. The goal-oriented, easily-motivated achievers seek to alleviate their
anxiety by setting higher and higher goals to grow toward, thus working away
from having to face the reality of their failing.
If the
purpose of labor is perverted by the lure of forbidden glory, if we allow
ourselves to be pressured by misguided educators and motivators, if we lose
ourselves psychotically in the pride of work, then we may be drawn to alcohol
and drugs to help us escape, not only into our work, but away from its morbid
consequences. In this dimension of consciousness, people have to get stoned to
get through the day and bombed when day is done!
Pseudo-successful
people begin to tremble as they near the top, for with each success comes the
dawning agony of ultimate reality. There they are, on top, with no further goal
to distract them or to egg them on. In their search for glory they have found
emptiness: success is failure, and failure is failure. Most of us are working
not toward hope, but toward hopelessness. Only when we stop does reality catch
up with us and we ask ourselves, "Why work? What is there to live for?
Why is everything so futile?" Before we go off the deep end, we may see
that we have existed as work zombies, psychotics, slaves in a dark world of
motivators, social psychopaths, self-appointed overlords.
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