It was a feeling akin to what Huxley described as 'an unspeakable sense of gratitude for the privilege of being born in the universe,' citing Blake's observation that 'gratitude is heaven itself.' In my life, there has been nothing so comforting as this state, rocked by LSD or MDA, in which I felt immensely grateful to the Lord for the breath in my body and the gift of life. The sense of belonging was consummate. It was as though I'd attainted the deceptively modest goal that Huxley ascribes to all of us: 'to discover that we have always been where we ought to be.

• observation
• heaven
• life
• happiness
• joy
• love
• psychedelic drugs
• gratitude
• zen
• awakening

At all events, the error and the illusion are the same in both socioeconomic ideologies, namely the serious assumption that existential misery can be reduced to suffering in one way or another from material want, and to impoverishment due to a given socioeconomic system. They assume that misery is greater among the disinherited or the proletariat than among those living in prosperous or privileged economic conditions, and that it will consequently diminish with the 'freedom from want' and the general advance of the material conditions of existence. The truth of the matter is that the meaning of existence can be lacking as much in one group as in the other, and that there is no correlation between material and spiritual misery. Only to the lowest and dullest levels of society can one preach the formula for all human happiness and wholeness as the well-named 'animal ideal,' a well-being that is little better than bovine. Hegel rightly wrote that the epochs of material well-being are blank pages in the history book, and Toynbee has shown the challenge to mankind of environmentally and spiritually harsh and problematic conditions is often the incentive that awakens the creative energies of civilization.

• capitalism
• communism
• existential
• suffering
• desire
• existence
• meaning
• society
• happiness
• history
• environment
• civilization
• creativity

Stars—spectacular representations of living human beings—project this general banality into images of permitted roles. As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations that they actually live. The function of these celebrities is to act out various lifestyles or sociopolitical viewpoints in a full, totally free manner. They embody the inaccessible results of social labor by dramatizing the by-products of that labor which are magically projected above it as its ultimate goals: power and vacations—the decision making and consumption that are at the beginning and the end of a process that is never questioned. On one hand, a governmental power may personalize itself as a pseudostar; on the other, a star of consumption may campaign for recognition as a pseudopower over life. But the activities of these stars are not really free, and they offer no real choices. \n\nThe agent of the spectacle who is put on stage as a star is the opposite of an individual; he is as clearly the enemy of his own individuality as of the individuality of others. Entering the spectacle as a model to be identified with, he renounces all autonomous qualities in order to identify himself with the general law of obedience to the succession of things. The stars of consumption, though outwardly representing different personality types, actually show each of these types enjoying equal access to, and deriving equal happiness from, the entire realm of consumption. The stars of decision making must possess the full range of admired human qualities: official differences between them are thus canceled out by the official similarity implied by their supposed excellence in every field of endeavor. As head of state, Khrushchev retrospectively became a general so as to take credit for the victory of the battle of Kursk twenty years after it happened. And Kennedy survived as an orator to the point of delivering his own funeral oration, since Theodore Sorenson continued to write speeches for his successor in the same style that had contributed so much toward the dead man’s public persona. The admirable people who personify the system are well known for not being what they seem; they attain greatness by stooping below the reality of the most insignificant individual life, and everyone knows it.

• life
• other
• power
• roles
• happiness
• public
• reality
• the spectacle
• model
• obedience
• labor
• personality
• law
• recognition
• celebrities

In killing my brothers, Krishna, I cannot see anything noble - I do not want this victory, this glory, this happiness.  What is glory to us, Krishna, what are pleasures and life, if those who from us deserve glory, pleasure, and life, are ready to fight us, having given up the world's delights - our uncles, our sons and our grandfathers, our eldest kinsmen, acharyas, our fathers-in-law and our grandsons.\n\n I would not kill them, not for the three worlds, let alone the earth.  I had rather they killed me, Krishna.

• desire
• hinduism
• lal
• peace
• pleasure
• war
• life
• victory
• law
• happiness
• krishna

At this very moment, the most frightful horrors are taking place in every corner of the world. People are being crushed, slashed, disembowelled, mangled; their dead bodies rot and their eyes decay with the rest. Screams of pain and fear go pulsing through the air at the rate of eleven hundred feet per second. After travelling for three seconds they are perfectly inaudible. These are distressing facts; but do we enjoy life any the less because of them? Most certainly we do not. We feel sympathy, no doubt; we represent to ourselves imaginatively the sufferings of nations and individuals and we deplore them. But, after all, what are sympathy and imagination? Precious little, unless the person for whom we feel sympathy happens to be closely involved in our affections; and even then they don't go very far. And a good thing too; for if one had an imagination vivid enough and a sympathy sufficiently sensitive really to comprehend and to feel the sufferings of other people, one would never have a moment's peace of mind. A really sympathetic race would not so much as know the meaning of happiness. But luckily, as I've already said, we aren't a sympathetic race. At the beginning of the war I used to think I really suffered, through imagination and sympathy, with those who physically suffered. But after a month or two I had to admit that, honestly, I didn't. And yet I think I have a more vivid imagination than most. One is always alone in suffering; the fact is depressing when one happens to be the sufferer, but it makes pleasure possible for the rest of the world.

• happiness
• suffering
• meaning
• life
• peace
• pleasure
• imagination
• war
• doubt
• fear
• other

It is easy to think that the Church has a lot of different objects - education, building, missions, holding services. Just as it is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects - military, political, ecnomic, and what not. But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden - that is what the state is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time. In the same way the Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time.'

• christianity
• government
• religion
• life
• education
• time
• christ
• economics
• happiness

Modern man is actually close to the picture Huxley describes in his Brave New World: well fed, well clad, satisfied sexually, yet without self, without any except the most superficial contact with his fellow men, guided by the slogans which Huxley formulated so succinctly, such as: 'When the individual feels, the community reels'; or 'Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today,' or, as the crowning statement: 'Everybody is happy nowadays.'  Man's happiness today consists in 'having fun.'  Having fun lies in the satisfaction of consuming and 'taking in' commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes, people, lectures, books, movies - all are consumed, swallowed.  The world is one great object for our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle, a big breast; we are the suckers, the eternally expectant ones, the hopeful ones - and the eternally disappointed ones.  Our character is geared to exchange and to receive, to barter and to consume; everything, spiritual as well as material objects, becomes an object of exchange and of consumption.

• capitalism
• huxley
• pleasure
• society
• lies
• self
• character
• happiness
• food
• community

Eventually, the mature person has come to the point where he is his own mother and his own father.  He has, as it were, a motherly and a fatherly conscience.  Motherly conscience says: 'There is no misdeed, no crime which could deprive you of my love, of my wish for your life and happiness.'  Fatherly conscience says: 'You did wrong, you cannot avoid accepting certain consequences of your wrongdoing, and most of all your must change your ways if I am to like you.'  The mature person has become free from the outside mother and father figures, and has built them up inside.'  

• conscience
• maturity
• love
• life
• change
• crime
• consequences
• happiness

In my view it is not necessary to destroy anything, all that need be destroyed in mankind is the idea of God, that is what one must proceed from! It is with that, with that one must begin - O, blind ones, who understand nothing! Once mankind, each and individually, has repudiated God (and I believe that that period, in a fashion parallel to the geological periods, will arrive), then of its own accord, and without the need of anthropophagy, the whole of the former world-outlook and, above all, the whole of the former morality, will collapse, and all will begin anew. People will unite together in order to take from life all that it is able to give, but only for the sake of happiness and joy in this world. Man will exalt himself with a spirit of divine, titanic pride, and the man-god will appear. Vanquishing nature hour by hour, already without limits, by his will and science, man will thereby experience, hour by hour, a pleasure so elevated that it will replace all his former hopes of celestial pleasure. Every man will discover that he is wholly mortal, without the possibility of resurrection, and will accept death proudly and calmly, like a god. Out of pride he will grasp that there is no point in him complaining that life is a moment, and he will come to love his brother without any need of recompense. The love will only be sufficient for the moment of life, but the very consciousness of life's momentariness will intensify its fire just as much as it formerly ran to fat in hopes of an infinite love beyond the grave.

• atheism
• death
• god
• love
• morality
• mortality
• life
• pleasure
• nature
• will
• experience
• consciousness
• joy
• spirit
• science
• happiness
• pride
• resurrection