Interlude in the Dark Valley

So, here we are. Responsible, self-aware, self-programming beings, and creatures specifically designed for the worship, adoration, praise, and contemplation of our Creator.

Is that what all of us actually do on any basis more frequently than we take in any other pleasures? Is that what we feel? Do we even like the idea? Does our world look like it reflects that fact, or some quite different state of affairs?

Surely, and sadly, it is a quite different state of affairs with us. What most of us really seem to experience in real life is a blindness, or deafness, or deadness to anything whatsoever that even hints of a higher being who might make a claim to be our felicity. And what we definitely experience is a profound sense of aloneness. Or as Aldous Huxley poetically put it:

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. ... Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable ... From family to nation,every human group is a society of island universes. (Footnote 5)

But if you have read this far, its probably because you are unhappy in some degree ( I did entitle it Twenty-Seven Metaphors to a Grasp of Happiness after all), and maybe you’ve known some people who seem to be happy on the basis we’ve just explored and would like, perhaps, to awaken a facility for it inside yourself. Keep on reading. I have some more metaphors. And they have to do with deadness, blindness, deafness, and aloneness.

Let’s take aloneness first.
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(5) Aldlous Huxley, The Doors of Perception. Yes, the Jim Morrison rock group was named after this book.