I am therefore ill at ease with people who earnestly abstain from such things as smoking, drinking, and sex, to the point of making them squeamishnessly militant.  Obviously, there are forms and degrees in which these pleasures can be unhygienic, as also can be driving cars, climbing mountains, and nursing the sick.  There are points of view from which almost everything can be see as bad for one's health, and Jung once remarked in jest that life itself is a disease with a very bad prognosis: it lingers on for years and invariably ends with death.  And in this connection I might also quote Freud, writing to Dr. Fleisch: 'As to your injunction to give up smoking, I have decided not to comply.  Do you think it such a good thing to live a long and miserable life?

• asceticism
• freud
• jung
• life
• pleasure
• sexuality
• death
• smoking
• writing
• sex
• disease

Going by a system is often, though not necessarily, an elaborate and subtle ego-trip in which people inflate their egos by trying to destroy them, stressing the superhuman difficulty of the task.  It can so easily be mere postponement of realization to the tomorrow which never comes, with the mock humility of, 'I'm not ready yet.  I don't deserve it.  Perhaps, if I work as hard as the great sages of old, I can get it in twenty years or in my next incarnation.'  But what if this is just self-punishment and spiritual masochism - lying as it were, on a bed of nails to assure oneself of 'authentic' existence?  Mortification of the ego is an attempt to get rid of what doesn't exist, or - which comes to the same thing - of the feeling that it exists...My point was, and has continued to be, that the Big Realization for which all these systems strive is not a future attainment but a present fact, that this now-moment is eternity, and that one must see it now or never.

• asceticism
• ego
• eternal present
• religion
• work
• self
• existence
• lying
• future
• eternity