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If one sees nature as a threat and pursues growth in opposition to this threat, through active engagement, then one is struggling for survival. The motivating principle is one’s salvation contingent upon the belief that changing reality demands adaptation from its inhabitants. I discovered this relationship between motivation and one’s worldview through analyzing my own process of self-realization. I experienced what I call a second-stage awareness exhibited not by reaction to a stimulus but by reflection. It’s like being hungry and contemplating the hunger instead of pursuing food. In my case, instead of simply trying to satisfy my desires for justice, equality, truth, enlightenment and greater harmony with nature I asked why it was that I was pursuing these things. By stepping outside of this multi-faceted pursuit momentarily and examining it I realized that I was being motivated by some unifying principle, or so I postulated. It was an experimental commitment to this idea that revealed to me the range of human motivation. For that reason I include this analysis of human motivation in the section concerning experiment. If our intention has palpable affects on our collection of data then our motivation for engagement is a perfectly valid starting point for progressive action. I will expand on this idea further in the chapter but for now it is sufficient to say that our motive for action is like a translation device for principles. Channeling principles through a primary motivation clarifies the action and therefore secures a higher level of efficacy. In other words, the clarification of our motive is not only the starting point of experimental living but in a very profound way it is the end point. Conscious commitment to one’s primary motivation clarifies both the object of pursuit and the self that pursues. Therefore, nothing will foster progress more than language that supports the inspired motivation toward it. This might seem like an evasion of my own challenge, as though I am skirting the issue, avoiding a description of the action that is required to support theory but commitment to a motivation is an action, however internal it might initially be. It is as much an action as picking up the tool that helps one achieve an object. The tools we use define our actions and motivation and its clarification is a tool for the enhancement of progress. For example, a mop, if held defines in unique ways a person’s relationship to nature. A gun, if held, defines in unique ways a person’s relationship with reality. A pen, if held, defines in unique ways a person’s relationship with reality. If one is motivated to have one’s floors cleaned he/she can accomplish that with all three of the aforementioned tools but first one must translate the tool into the proper force or action that will accurately achieve the object given the parameters of the tool. Each tool exhibits a unique signature allowing for a particular list of choices available to its use so one must be aware of this before picking up a tool in the first place. The same is true for the primary motivations of human beings. There are, in my estimation, a finite number of motivations and this small list of possible orientations with reality can be tested. This is my defense for considering motivation as a field of experiment. To be conscious of one’s motive, regardless of its propriety, is quite a progressive leap from the inner severance that many experience with life whereby they wonder why they are doing the things that they are doing. This chapter has as its aim the illumination of human action. It is a product of my primary motivation to save the world, therefore biased, and as we will see cannot be otherwise.
Remember, that society is a construct consisting of a finite albeit very large number of individual actions. These are the building blocks of our social reality. The nature of society can be understood by the way in which these actions are chosen. In other words, power can be understood, the way it flows and operates, by learning to identify our motives and what affect they have on the construction, via action,of social life. The subtext, almost tangential, referential to the description of the problem, is that those who suffer from abuse of power are experiencing collective action and if those actions can be identified in our individual lives then real choice will emerge, empowered and educated choice. Motivation then is the birth canal of freedom.
The Savior
The development of this idea of motives came from my suffering and dissatisfaction and understanding the nature of that state is essential to the development of the idea. I hope the reader will forgive the autobiographical description but I see no other way to illustrate how such an idea may be conceived. It is a testament to the wisdom of the human family that its healing paradigms are born in those peoples that have been degraded by human corruption. This gives me faith. Suffice it to say, that my childhood was one heavily affected by rampant alcoholism. Although my understanding of this disease will be further explained in this theory, the disease of alcoholism is part of a network of self-destructive behavior that includes the tangential elements of poverty, neglect, violence and shame. It was within the collision of these forces that my suffering reached its transformative state. In the humiliation of my terror I appealed to God, as a child does, making promises, bargains. I pledged my life to helping others, for some reason assuming this was God’s will, in exchange for salvation from the horrors of poverty and alcoholism. If I were allowed to grow in the midst of all the degradation that surrounded me (a rare thing) I would commit my life to serve what saved me from the expectations of my community. Now I am a man and I understand that it is a natural thing for a frightened child to make such promises. I have compassion for my own desperate attempts to secure my sanity. One might say now that I have washed ashore to sanity and security that I should forgive my past and attempt to enjoy the remainder of my life, that this would be an act of gratitude. However, I am still haunted by my promise, by the faces of all my schoolmates, those children like me returning to abusive homes, running around on the streets unloved, neglected, depending on gangs for their security, stealing for snacks and entertainment. I am haunted by the staggering numbers of children who were not spared, who live in the recreation of that horror. I am not digressing here to make an appeal for child advocacy, rather I am retelling the story of my discovery and how its roots find their nourishment in my experiences with the greater threat. As an adult I find my expression of concern for these forgotten children excites certain responses from my loved ones, my teachers, my advisors, my bosses, my family and my friends. I am encouraged to be grateful for what I have, to focus on myself, to detach from the pains of compassion. I am told to concentrate on my abundance and forget myself in a kind of bourgeois sensuality. For better or worse, it is undeniable that the character of my life has been etched very deeply with a relationship to poverty, violence and addiction. How could I forget such things? I have tried, only achieving a slight proximity to denial through recreating the degradation in my life, but still I could not keep ahead of my conscience. How do others forget these things? These are questions that led me to my theory of human motivation.
The suffering of my childhood magnified by the conflict between my adult self and the advice from my loved ones (the world) created a tension within which I asked myself the initial question. What was I trying to accomplish? What desire was driving my resistance to the given answers to these quandaries? The answer, revealed to me by the very people who claimed I could not save the world, was that I was trying to do just that, save the world. I could water it down and say I was looking for improved social conditions, that I was trying to grant kids better opportunities, that I was trying to lessen the pain of poverty but with extrapolation it was impossible to detach any one variable from the other. All forms of deterioration, degradation and humiliation seemed to be parts of a universal threat posed against humanity. And so, after some meditation, it seemed the most succinct way of describing my motivation toward progress was to describe it as a will toward simultaneous salvation for myself and my community. In the ghetto, in poverty, in war many things are destroyed but most importantly the human spirit falls as the greatest victims of these crimes, torn to shreds, leaving hollowed out human beings with nothing but terror to fill in the gaps. A person who confronts such a dark reality with hope has a savior’s heart.
A very interesting thing happened once I clarified what it was that defined my principal motivations. Once I accepted that this taboo desire for universal salvation existed in the deepest layer of my optimism I challenged myself, somewhat in secret, to commit to this motive. I decided to do so without shame but also without announcing it, not apologizing but also not seeking validation from others for my actions. It was this leap, this very internal but profound cleansing of uncertainty that led to this science of living. It is this analysis of motive that acts as the fulcrum for human engagement with reality allowing one to hoist the great weight of human suffering upon his/her shoulders. For the sake of clarity, I am not trying to rid the world of suffering, only the shameful pointless suffering of brutality and ignorance, the suffering of sacrifice shall remain forever and always but that will always be counterbalanced by the joys of progress.
And so of the five motives I have described the first and most essential. As it was the first one I discovered it led to a deeper understanding of the others because it forced me to encounter human beings with a new perspective, one of a self-aware man looking at otherswith curiosity and objectivity.
The Conformer
The utilization of the savior motive led to all kinds of developments, including the art of reading and the art of self-purification that follows, it gave me an intention that could be used to create motion, action and a life of progress. My initial reason for adopting this motivation however was strictly experimental, a manifestation of curiosity. I wondered how it would change my relationships if I consistently referred to my new motivation when faced with decisions or dilemmas. My childhood and early adulthood experiences were dominated by victimization but living from this curious theory gave me a new sense of adventure and I found that empowering.
As it became more and more essential for me to express my dissatisfactions without apology I was challenged by my new motivation to point to those injustices that demanded action. Having nothing to lose my former hopelessness was transformed into courage as I became more and more forthright with my social criticism. The persecution I had expected, the harassment that history taught me to be afraid of as I began to rebel against propriety, wealth and inequality did not come often from an agency or institution, although some did and still does occur; the barriers to progress were presented to me mostly by my loved ones, those that cared for me, those who had already accepted the impossibility of the situation. Their insistence on gratitude for that which is mine, taking comfort in the luck of the draw, the choices of fate, reminded me of the way dogs love one another, as a pack. More specifically it is the way slaves love one another, discouraging confrontation with an irrational master. There are some acquaintances in my new life that affirm my perspective, I am not alone, but they are certainly a slimminority and even they have difficulty talking with any certainty about a system of resistance.
Sometimes, when I insisted on speaking freely, I have pressed forward demanding that my loved ones take notice of our confinement. I have hurt people in this effort and I am sorry for that. It seems that this topic can expose buried resentment in my fellows and I have now found modes of expression that are more voluntary. I cannot understand the lack of enthusiasm many have for logical discourse, how some confuse reason with power, fearing that engagement in discussion will open them up to manipulation. I am happy to be manipulated to higher states of thinking. Every person is responsible for the changes they make in their moral and philosophical perspective regardless of outside influence. This fear of reasonable pursuit can only lead to greater dangers.
Once living with this new motivation, a will toward salvation, I was immediately curious what was driving these loved ones, those resistant to collective progressive action. What was it that inspired their daily activities, decisions and activities? What is it, I wondered, that motivates a slave? In other words, by simply offering myself to the experimental process of this new idea I began to see motivation as a necessary precursor to human action and acting from a specific viewpoint brought to light the contrast of other motivations. This is the reason that experiment is so necessary to the science of living because participation driven by hypothesis yields a much greater variety of knowledge than mere speculation.
As I looked around at all the activity I was encountering it seemed most fitting to describe it as conformity, whether it was my loved ones telling me to focus on myself, or the thousands of people I saw every day solving their problems by what seemed like an infinite variety of ways. Even though the great diversity disguised itself as freedom I discovered that these choices were not as free as many might assume. Otherwise, why would our loved one’s exercise such concerns about the importance of these choices when we attempt to creatively engage with them? An individual in a society such as mine is bound on all sides by an old moral paradigm that lends itself to a limited strategy of engagement. On top of this simplistic structure a great variety has developed but that is a matter of adornment rather thanfreedom. As we travel across the great multiplicitous landscape of modern society we have all the volition of a pinball. It is this reduction of choice that is symptomatic of conformity, a retardation of the creative drive. This weakening of the imagination is the essential mechanism for both the cultivation of conformity and the elimination of dissatisfaction and social criticism. In all this complexity conflict and confusion is inevitable and one might think this would inspire creative responses but the conformist adheres religiously to society’s given answers and protocols regardless of the mutation of the problem. Applying outdated solutions to evolving problems makes regression inevitable but this is what conformists do. This simplicity of engagement makes for a bouncy life, as an individual becomes a very real cog in the machine. A conformist finds comfort in this.
To conform to society’s given answers to life’s problems is to believe in the value of the work of history so much as to disregard the nature of that work. In other words, it is a contradictory approach to living. If one believes the premise that our environment is constantly changing and therefore that our solutions should also be, then one can see that an undue commitment to conformity can be a dangerous enterprise, given that the nature of environmental change acts as a threat to humanity. Of course, the instinct for conformity can be a healthy motivation as it is essential for a social animal to be able to act in concordance with a group, given that the group’s activity, as verified by one’s conscience, is pointed in a healthy direction. A group engaged in self-destruction however owes its survival to those that can save it from its denial of genuine threats.
And so my commitment to saving humanity from destruction led me to the seeming paradox that most of my fellow human beings were conforming with that destruction. I could not comprehend this, how a human being could operate from an unhealthy motive. Wasn’t it crucial that one’s motivation be understood as having a reward? For instance, although my motivation toward salvation guaranteed certain hardships, the satisfaction and unification of my mind, body and spirit more than compensated for the cost. My hope and enthusiasm for living made the sacrifices more meaningful. And so if conformity is a destructive motive, a false motive as I argue, what reward accounts for such an overwhelming commitment to it? Within the psychological structure of a human being I felt it was sound to assume that self-preservation holds priority and that out of that structure motivation is born. So, I began doubting my theory of motivation, seeing that any reasonable investigation of one’s motive would underscore the dangers of conformity making progressive approaches more common. However, in the middle of this setback, after meditating on the issue, as I was certain that something separated me from my fellows, I realized that reason (the mechanism responsible for self-preservation) could be manipulated, perverted into rationalization. In order to move forward I considered the notion that people might be rationalizing their commitment to conformity in order to avail themselves of some short-term reward even though that commitment had long-term destructive affects. I feared that I was beginning to rationalize my theory. If human beings were in fact forcing themselves into destructive cooperation then the reward for conformity would have to be so great that they would trade in their most valuable asset, the ability to reason, for this reward. But how does one do such a thing, trade in reason, perverting it into rationalization? Reason is by nature intrusive. It is our conscience, injecting itself into the foreground of our consciousness to guide us toward personal progress, and it is that part of our self that is most concerned with self-preservation. How could one limit such afaculty? Sedation seemed to be the only answer, the only way to confound reason, to allow work to be done against its will. The use of drugs, alcohol, excess food, stimulants, pharmaceuticals, television, sex, etc.: sedation would allow a person to numb the faculty of reason so that one could rationalize conforming to a social process that was, in the long run, outside the scope of one’s retarded foresight, destructive and hopeless. I felt that this argument allowed for the possibility of a false motivation. Due to the overwhelming numbers of human beings engaged in these activities I began to suspect that this great age of sedation might absolutely be targeted at human motivation. I had now secured some movement forward in spite of my trepidation. All that was needed to clarify this conformity motive, therefore supporting the necessity for salvation, was to dissect the experience of conformity in order to find a reward great enough to account for such outrageous and complicated behavior.
The human condition is an innately mysterious one that resists quantification. It is a difficulty like the uncertainty principle that promises to confound us for a long time. Science has merely proven that the cosmos is subject to the same somewhat terrifying and fascinating condition that we live with consciously. It is a reprieve from this consciousness of the human condition that acts as the reward for conformity. This is a profound reward that convinces its adherent that life’s questions have answers. Those actively conforming to social inertia affirm in action that the objects of human pursuit have been attained. They believe therefore that satisfaction is a form of virtue, or a kind of self-esteem for a species that has achieved its ends. This satisfaction with life removes the need for creative thought and experimental living, both of which are frightening and laborious. These aspects of the imagination, for the conformist, are considered pointless and therefore a conformist very rarely faces, with the naked soul, the mystery and magnitude of the cosmos and the existential questions that beg for our attention via the reason. This internal contradiction, this denial of reality, is difficult to maintain but the reward is a release from life’s most difficult and terrifying challenges. And so in the face of that temptation human beings find ways to rationalize the perspective that we have reached our zenith as a species, that no more adaptation is needed, and furthermore that the threats facing us are easily countered by good individuals and that it is only the weak and insidious human beings that are foiled by these trifling puzzles. There is too much evidence in opposition to this to maintain such a simplistic view but sedation helps to blur the image of the world into a soft picture of paradise. This concerted effort to conform to old methodologies represents our greatest barrier to progress. It is my hope that this work will help reveal to some their committed abstinence from the necessary contemplation of life’s mysteries and further that this abstinence has very real consequences and finally, that a transformation of attitude is our only hope for a thriving future. A human being that does not nurture a romantic relationship with existence is an animal and nothing more.
It is not simply this mystery of existence that drives men and women into the cave of conformity; they are not hiding only from the midnight sky. Violence, mass murder, warfare, humiliation and abuse, all advertised and experienced as dark forces of existence, add to this mystery a crushing pessimism. Our reason insisting on justice and balance must be silenced in order to maintain one’s distance from the threat. We learn very early that the squeaky wheel does not often get the oil; more often it gets discarded and replaced. In order to shut off that voice of conscience and social justice most turn to conformity in this great age of consumption, numbing their sensitivity to these horrors hoping that their silent obedience will save them from being singled out in the accidental grinding gears of a dying machine.
The forms of sedation are many, but in order to make more thorough my challenge I would like to include detachment on the list of tools people use to separate themselves from the responsibilities of the conscience. Detachment has many valid applications for those conforming to a spiritual way of life but it cannot be one’s foundation. The only foundation can be found in the motivation toward universal salvation, that is the argument. Detachment as a tool is great when used to gain victory over our addictions or our anger, our lust, our jealousy, etc. For these things detachment has a quality unmatched by any other spiritual mechanism but when this tool is used against the pains of compassion then I am arguing that it is being used as a sedative, abused in order to suppress our reason and therefore maintaining in our silent conformity the feeling that we know that which we do not.
Let us not forget that we live in an environment where brute strength and its expression are valued, that the very images calling us to question our motives are violent and oppressive. These facts help us to understand why so many would choose to sedate their reason and live in blind obedience.
So it was from a commitment to the expression of my dissatisfaction that I discovered the nature of its opposite, the motivation that led the satisfied majority. Conformity is an unnatural state, given the abundance of danger, achieved by the use of various forms of sedation. As we will discuss in the next chapter the only healthy conformity would have to exist without any contradiction to our process of purification. This acts as the litmus, the measure of our social construct.
The Inferior Motives
The picture of human history is often painted with the monochromatic hues of conformity and salvation but the color of history, its real values, and the texture of human life derive from the struggle against the three inferior motives. I call the following motives inferior because they are explicitly destructive to the social contract. They are an acute expression of the terror experienced by human beings that feel isolated from justice, equality and love.
The King
Ambition, a desire for the kind of success that can be held, experienced in a selfish way, reinforcing feelings of superiority, is responsible for the actions that can be described as examples of the King motive. This longing for superiority over other human beings can creep into the lives of both conformists and saviors but it does so in ways unique to each motivation. For instance, the man or woman working toward progress can sometimes become impatient, out of a strained faith, fearing a wasted life, or out of laziness wishing to live in the future progress. This impatience can lead to illegitimate uses of power. In the madness of the King motivation, a kind of delusion, the well-intentioned person confuses his/her domination of others with obligation. Out of a desire for evidence of their efficacy they begin to see their abuse of others as the burden of their wisdom. This evidences pride and feelings of supremacy and the inevitable failure of the effort brings forth further disappointment that, if the experience does not humble the person, can lead to hopelessness and a desperate recommitment to the king motive. A person motivated toward salvation cannot maintain such a contradictory relationship with reality without either returning to a legitimate pursuit of progress or falling to one of the inferior motives. So ambition is a constant danger for someone motivated toward salvation.
In the conformist the king motive derives from an explicit desire for greater resources, a natural development of the sedative war against reason. Just as the savior abandons the very principles that define him/her so too does the conformist, overwhelmed by desire, discard the comfortable structure of certainty temporarily to gain greater access to sedation. This ambition of the conformist is evidence of a failure to maintain mental numbness, and the king motive saves the conformist from fully detaching from the illusion that he/she is living with some measure of certainty. The reason, as it struggles to shake its host from its destructive path, erupts occasionally like a solar flare, hoping to surprise its host into an inspiration toward salvation. The king motive aids in the strengthening of conformity by allowing its host to secure, through mostly nefarious means, higher levels of sedation. In an ambitious society like mine these avenues for domination have become almost cyclically bound to successful conformity so that conformity and domination are often indistinguishable. A successful conformist, one able to maintain denial, is one with great powers of rationalization that enable superiority binges driven by a dominating spirit. So one of the further dangers of conformity is its proximity to this king motive. Many of those that dominate the social arena justify their abusive behavior by their insistence in the protection of greater conformity.
The temporary abandonment of primary motivation creates a psychological schism and as human motivation has a direct relationship with self-realization this fracturing of one’s principles and the resultant terror are a very real danger to the processes of personal development, social progress and the maintenance of one’s sanity. I will digress to say that in the transition between states of motivation a human being is vulnerable to progressive guidance, since they are momentarily formless, but this chaos is not a place one should go into along or uninvited. Suffice it to say that the clarification of one’s primary motivating principle as well as the conscious commitment to it are the two activities out which self-realization is achieved. Character, in a moral sense, then is the development of personal unity. Disunity of character is evidence then of a great cowardice, a terror of sitting still long enough to realize one’s personal desires and a further fear of finding ways to pursue their satisfaction. One who is a dominating king in some instances and a submissive conformist in others is running from a confrontation with reality. He/she satiates suppressed desire with sensual sedation, creating a destructive and downwardly spiraling dependence that destroys their reason, and here I mean reason as in purpose, their reason for being here.
The Destroyer
Many times one’s social graces cannot be maintained as the structure of conformity fails to match the magnitude of the growing terror of the inevitable confrontation with reality. A human being trying to either conform or to dominate his/her resources is sometimes overcome with the truth as they experience an eruption of their subconscious. In these moments it seems as if all avenues for sedation have been exhausted, not that there aren’t many forms, but sometimes quite suddenly they seem hopeless and futile. As the mind looms large like a giant thunderstorm these people are backed into a psychological corner and they behave as a frightened animal does. In such moments human beings unwilling to listen to the voice of conscience are closest to their animal state. The destroyer is someone who makes choices at random not driven from any one motive but allowing the great flood of feelings and emotions to engage an onslaught of activity. Activity for these people becomes the last hope for sedation; human drama aids in the denial of the dark cloud that looms on the horizon. Distraction is the final mechanism for detachment from the pursuit of one’s purpose. The destroyer is running from an inevitable mental and psychic collapse, a breakdown. Many times they are being attacked by their reason in the soul’s desperate, sometimes final, attempt to save the body from total moral corruption. The destroyer is someone whose body is a battleground of ideals. They experience this war and bring it, in the form of chaos, to society. What the destroyer brings, destruction and chaos, is contagious as it confounds the reason; it is a great danger to those whom seek unity.
Someone operating from a motive toward salvation would not find themselves suddenly motivated to destroy, as they are dependant upon their reason. These two motives, to progress and to destroy are mutually exclusive. In order for someone working on progress to become a destroyer he/she must have fallen due to a frustrated ambition that has turned into a rage. And those conformists whose reason has outrun their sedation challenging them to face up to life, they turn to destruction as a desperate and final attempt to escape from life’s uncertainty. The motivation to destroy is the soul’s swan song. It is a fiery requiem for the child’s innocent spirit that leaves behind a hollowed out human being capable of endless evil. Because of its chaotic nature the destroyer can sometimes appear friendly or kind but the direction of his/her flight will always be downward, the occasional kindness or appeal for help should be handled carefully. The most common form of the destroyer motive is found when in frustration with daily temptations and struggles we throw away our enthusiasm for progress and pick up instead a frivolous attitude. The great reward for destruction is that one may reach a point of detachment with consciousness that is total. Dysfunction has a seductive simplicity to it.
It is much more difficult, more subtle and complicated – let’s not be naïve – building a life around progress. It requires the art of reading and interpretation, it requires introspection, meditation, receiving guidance and trusting others, and it requires the faithful commitment to the unknown and a lifelong resistance to false power. To destroy, to allow oneself to become fully guided by rage, is not a difficult thing to do and it is exactly this ease that accounts for its popularity. A rage filled person is however a coward, a soul centered upon avoidance, struggling against the responsibility of life itself. I do not lack compassion for fear-based living. I was once motivated by it myself. My courage to live from faith is as much a mystery as it was when I lacked it. The mystery, however, will not keep me from expressing the truth because it was the written truth found in various places that did save me from my rage and my desire to destroy by challenging me to live courageously. The existence of such people, motivated by rage and fear to destroy, makes reasonable my effort to build a science that has courage as one its forms of application.
The Suicidal Motive
Clarifying the motivation and the structure of destructive human behavior helped me a great deal in understanding the experiences that led to this whole experimental approach to my existence. Scientific living is a beautiful thing in that it is healing. I had, because of my willingness to try this new perspective, accounted for the entire range of human activity, or so it seemed to me. I am sure, as with all scientific endeavors that some things have been omitted without my knowing it but I feel certain that a pretty clear picture of the social world can be drawn from the four formerly described motives. However, as I began to look at the picture I was drawing I realized that a great number of human beings were missing. The picture I had drawn contained only people doing, engaging with society and its problems in a proactive way. What about all the people that were doing nothing? What motivates inaction? This would be the final question, the answer to which would satisfy me in my search to explain human behavior in how it relates to society and progress.
Certainly there are those whom resist my motivation toward salvation as they urge me to conform. There are those that try to dominate me, seeking to exploit my effort. There are those that seek to destroy me in order to express their rage and inner chaos. And, of course, there is the occasional meeting of the minds, encounters with people like myself whom share an enthusiasm for progressive living. These encounters are the illuminated moments of my life, the kaleidoscope of human motivation, set against a great dark backdrop of non-motivated humanity. Stars in a sea of darkness. What is this darkness? What is it that drives inaction since life itself is a kind of animation? As I discussed previously progress is the successful adaptation against the inertia of nature and thus it demands a kind of vigilant motivation. Since nature is experienced as interactions of phenomena through time, a strict and precise balancing of forces, a human being that does not engage in motivations that serve one’s preservation is at all times in danger of nature’s tendency toward destruction. Progress is postponement of that destruction for purposes of the soul. And so, I began to speculate that those human beings that disengage all motivation could be understood as motivated de facto toward self-destruction, death, or suicide. If life is a process of growth then those who are not taking part in the process are in the way of it or in danger of it. Suicidal people have a will to die. They have given themselves to the realm of fate and thus given up onenthusiasm. They are burnt out souls, not always those who take their own life. In fact, suicidal people very rarely orchestrate their own destruction. Rather, they operate on the lowest possible life force waiting for the gears of society to grind them into nothingness. They sometimes help it along with poisonous foods, drugs and activities but their lack of enthusiasm is so complete that the speed of their journey toward death is of no concern. In some way they are already dead. It is the motivation toward suicide that explains the shameless inaction and sighs of hopelessness that affect the majority. These people invite their destruction hoping finally to end the pain of existence but lacking the faith to believe even in that final reprieve. The suicidal person sees existence as suffering and expects nothing else from it. The presence of this type of human being is evidence of the last days of civilization, they are symptoms of a great social illness and they can be beneficial as such, if they are seen as a call to action.
Summary
If one wishes to live experimentally then reality requires some motivation for engagement and the previous list is proposed as a complete description of one’s options. Firstly, one may wish to improve his/her surroundings. Second, one may wish to conform to the environment and experience life as fate. Thirdly, one may seek to manipulate the environment to selfish ends. Fourthly, a person might seek to destroy the reality and lastly, one may wish to do nothing in order to feel life for what it is as its antithesis.
The argument, posed against the backdrop of a threatened human environment, posits that salvation is the single motivation that can lead to a greater utilization of reason and can therefore secure knowledge of the kind that has survival as its main object of application. The other four motives are destructive to reason and should be treated as such. One would be practicing a false science if seeking to gain understanding through conformity, ambition, destruction or inaction; though many do look for knowledge this way they find only their own destruction and the destruction of others.
Our life is given to us as force, a finite amount of effort that we may place at every moment in any one of these five directions. The concentration of this effort or force into these motives will account for the clarity of our existence and the depth of our self-realization. In the face of a growing threat only the progressive man or woman will know the glory of existence, fully grateful for the miracle of being, untainted by any false allegiances or the shame of habitual destructive behavior.
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