It might be pleasure, after all pleasure is surely one of the needs we live to satisfy in oh so many ways. For some it's found in images whilst for others it's music - the muses of old harnessed and shackled, cajoled and controlled and mastered- and yet touching us at a point of need (or should that be desire?).
Then there's that thing which confers the illusion of being that which you perceive as generous and morally right - that which peddles the illusion that you are a good, moral, and 'right' person. The need to be, as a supervisor many years back, 'A good sort!' But it's sated by dropping a few coins into the cap of the beggar or by responding to that appeal on Radio Four or signing that sponsorship sheet. Look at me - I wear a poppy, a daffodil, a piece of pink silk, I must be a good person.
Mustn't I?
If we can find that thing that takes away the emptiness, that feeling that we are somehow short, somehow wrong, somehow needy - not quite right. That thing that keeps us drinking, dancing, talking, reading, watching, listening, living, copulating, earning, spending, possessing, doing, being - in the knowledge that it will bring us into that place - the reason we live:
Ecstasy
Nirvhana
Paradise
Knowledge
Salvation
Salvation? Now there's a product to be refined, packaged and peddled!
Look at the many people out there with feeble minds, some shattered (or at least crazed) by mental and emotional fault lines caused by chemical imbalance or the influence of drug, drink and the people they've meet. That ready market who will put aside reason and caution to buy into the words and images that confer the moral, spiritual and intellectual rectitude that has eluded them.
We all know them - the people who will buy into that message that brings it near to their grasp - and yet the possession of the grail is momentary. A fleeting tingle; that momentary feeling of have made it. That tingle we feel when we've acted in such a way that we feel some connectiveness, so tangible connection with whatever or whoever we seek: That 'having touched the face of God' moment.kilkkk
What if you could sell that?
Isn't that what the TV prophets, the snake oil salesmen, the shopping channels, the sex industry, the drug pushers, the barren, the advertising industry, the plastic surgeons, the moving (and static) images, the musicians and so many others - isn't that what they do?
The modern atheist - often corrupting science as badly as those who are religious do - seeks it in reason and yet often, ironically, without reason or logic. They have no god - only their unscientific, illogical, bitter prophets - they're free thinkers (as long as they're told what to freely think)!
The person of faith - any faith, any god, any focus for their hope - seek it in in ways that contradict and contract into something self-serving and of their own construction. Seeking to buy salvation - or the hope of it through whatever guru is in vogue, or hasn't fallen (yet) by watching! listening! reading! sending their donations!
The humanist - lives (should that be exists?) in an existence that comes and goes and has no other purpose or reason other than to be now. No progression, purpose or hope really. That state of being that, as a humanist conducting a funeral had it, means, 'This is all we get - born, live, die and then gone as if we were never were - our value being in the memories of those who remember us!'
And when they forget we are gone - it as if we never were.
The more I reflect on what 'THE' product is.
That thing which would really sell and would sate the desires of all in every sense and for every sense: Seen, heard, felt, smelt and tasted. the more I reflect upon it I find myself coming back to something that should be handed out for free - not sold, not exchanged for gold or experience or satisfying our desires - and that is Jesus.
And it's a freebie!
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