If you're ready for the practice of being pleasure, you're no longer in exile; if you're still in exile, this practice will not be an effective way for you to work on development. It's important to consider exile - what it is, how you got there, and how you got out - to place the practice of being pleasure in context and clarify the kind of work you need to do now. Very different approaches to development are required by those who have never gone into exile, those who are in exile, and those who have escaped exile. You can get some idea of these by reading about the stages of becoming; exile is the middle stages, when you're a seeker. If you read this page and suspect you're still in exile, you are.
Exile is a necessary developmental state. Humans have to go through exile to reach the later stages of development. It's not bad or wrong, it's simply necessary. The work you have to do while in exile, leading up to escaping exile, is very different than the work you do after. The practice of being pleasure is for those who've made it out of exile, who've found salvation.
Exile is miserable, and exiles are very clever at finding ways to deny exile, to turn away from it, to hide out from it. The whole bloated entertainment industry is just distraction from the misery of exile. The same goes for the self-help or human potential or whatever you want to call it industry; it's all highly lucrative self-serving bullshit sold as distraction to help people feel better about their misery. Religions have always been like that; self-help and human potential are just ways of repackaging the same old tired bullshit.
Nothing much is possible in life, so why bother? That's the meat of the conspiracy; it's the glue that holds exile together. It's the excuse for doing nothing, for slacking off, for not upsetting the applecart, for keeping everything safe and "comfortable." Sure, go to church or temple or meeting or your rolfer or crystal healer or whatever if you want, just get it over with. Buy into the conspiracy and that's the script; that's your life.
Exile sums up human misery. The sense of having lost a precious homeland, a place where everything was right and made sense is felt by all exiles. Exile comes from two sources: misunderstanding the nature of the universe, and refusing to participate in it. The misunderstanding isn't that hard to clear up; it's a matter of learning to see things differently. The refusal to participate goes very deep; that can only end when a person chooses salvation.
You exile yourself by refusing to enter the homeland that's all around you; your exile is a matter of stubbornly clinging to an imaginary place. The imaginary world you've exiled yourself to is dark and grim; you have to fight for every little bit of anything, and then hold onto what you've got for dear life and protect it from everyone who's trying to take it away from you. But the world you actually live in is a world where everything's a gift.
You, the world and everything in it is a gift from God. God didn't just give it to us and go away, God is giving us everything all the time, continuously; God is giving you each breath you breathe, each second of your existence. The universe is a one-way flow, from God to you; you're not responsible for any of it. Exile is a mental condition where you fail to understand that everything's a gift, and start making up bogus laws.
I'm not talking about the laws of the land; they're generally useful and actually quite sensible for the most part. The laws I'm talking about are internal; they're bogus laws you make up that dictate the terms of your exile. Like the law that says when somebody gets something you didn't get, it somehow takes something away from you so you need to hate that person. Or the law that says you better not help anyone too much or they'll push you aside and take your place.
The exile sees almost everything as foreign and dangerous; only a tiny fraction is safe and familiar. The little bit you have must be protected from what's foreign and dangerous by any and all means or it'll be taken away and then you'll have nothing. Life is a bitter struggle to hold on to a meager allotment that you have to defend against all comers, to the death.
This kind of exile is a state of mind. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of how everything works, what everything is. Everything around you is your world; nothing in it is foreign because it's all a gift God is giving you; it's your world, you own it. It's all there for you to take and use as you see fit.
Exile as a state of mind exists because people refuse to grasp that the world and everything in it is a gift from God. If you can grasp that and stay with it, the exile story starts to wear thin. You begin to see holes in it, inconsistencies and ways the story doesn't quite hold together. You can't think your way out of exile while you're in its grasp because the fears it feeds and feeds on keep you from thinking clearly; your mind is powerless against the lies of exile. Instead of trying to match wits with your fears, you have to undercut the whole idea of exile by stubbornly seeing the universe as a gift. Do that, and the flimsy story of exile will crumble and come apart at the seams.
On a much deeper level, exile is the inescapable fact that you will never be satisfied because you bear the curse of becoming. You're incomplete, and you'll never be complete; that's the truth for you and nothing will ever change it. You can't dispel that by learning to see things differently because it's no story, it's the truth. The only remedy for exile is to transform the curse of becoming into a blessing, to embrace incompleteness and becoming. You do this by choosing to participate in creation and becoming a co-conspirator with God in a fabulous adventure of being forever incomplete, forever longing to be more and forever becoming more. The only way you can save yourself is to participate in creation; nothing else will ever do it for you.
Every "spiritual" or "self-help" thing that exiles do are simply attempts to deny or run away from exile, to be soothed, to make things feel better. That's the wrong way to go; running away never works. The exile has to dive to the bottom of the pit of exile to get out, because even the tiniest bit of denial of the truth is holding back, hoping that maybe things will work out somehow. You can't participate in creation, you can't enter the protection and encouragement of God's grace if you're holding back; you have to give up and turn to God without reservation. The key to the kingdom is at the bottom of the pit and nowhere else, because the bottom of the pit is full unflinching acceptance of the fact that life is just as bad as you secretly think it is, and probably worse. Once you get there, once you find your way to the unflinching honesty that is the bottom of the pit, you'll discover you're not in a pit after all, and everything will look different. You'll realize that bitter incompleteness is in fact God's greatest gift to you, an invitation to become like God. But there are no shortcuts, no work-arounds, no paths to grace that don't pass through the bottom of the pit. The bottom of the pit is the first encounter with truth.
If you've escaped exile, the world and your life aren't miserable. This has nothing to do with a "positive outlook;" it's simply a matter of how things seem to you, in and of themselves. If you're concerned with keeping a positive outlook, you're still in exile. Once you escape exile that's no longer of interest; it's not something that would occur to you as important. The section above describes life from an exile's point of view. If you're no longer in exile, it'll all seem faintly preposterous; why would anyone think like that? The same goes for the lie of selfishness; it just doesn't make sense to you; it's not how you think and it may be kind of a stretch for you to believe that other people really do think like that. Alas, they do.
If you're still in exile, progress is more often than not an illusion. You can work very hard on some issue, and feel like you're making good progress, but then when something real comes up in your life to test that progress, bam: you're right back where you started. If you've escaped exile, progress may be easy or hard, but in either case it's very clear to you that it's progress, that it's solid, and it doesn't just disappear. Sure, you may lose ground in some specific area, but it's not at all hard to gain it back again once you see that's happening. Other people will be able to see your progress as well: they'll see that you're changing. They may not consider it progress; people you're close to generally don't like it when you change. But they won't be able to deny the change.
What is forgiveness? If you borrow money, but then your debt's forgiven, you don't have to pay the money back. Forgiveness means you get off the hook. It's a scam; nobody gets off the hook. Everything counts absolutely. You have to clean up your own messes; that's the law. There are no exceptions. Forgiveness is the bait in the scam run by shamans, preachers, priests, motivational speakers and other such con artists. Getting you to pay them to let you off the hook is how they fleece the marks. Back in the day, it was protection from divine retribution. It gets called all kinds of things these days, but the idea's the same: somebody's letting you off the hook. Don't buy what they're selling; it doesn't exist. Whatever form you think forgiveness takes, you can forget it. It's a scam. You're on the hook for everything you ever did.
You save yourself - end your exile - by choosing to participate in creation. When you come to and turn toward God and say OK I'm ready to get started, you get something way better than forgiveness: you get the protection and encouragement of God's grace. No sins get washed away, but all your messes - all the things you have to fix - become projects, things to work on; they're kind of interesting. And you have all the help in the world and more to work on them. This is when the real work begins; this is when you're ready for the practice of being pleasure.
Salvation has nothing to do with religion or with anyone's mumbo jumbo, and no one can have any effect on your salvation or lack of it but you. No one can save you, and you can't save anyone else. Religions - all religions - should be avoided at this stage of development. Salvation is purely internal, and can only happen when you turn toward God, toward being by your own free will and on your own initiative. Salvation has nothing to do with belief or faith. To save yourself, you have to shake off belief and faith; those are nothing but weasel words people use when they're not being honest enough to admit they're ignorant, they don't know. They're weasel words used by the ignorant when they're trying to con other ignorant people into somehow paying for salvation, a despicable scam. "You must believe, you must have faith" - if you hear anything like that, you can be dead certain that someone's out to scam you.
You save yourself by standing on the bedrock of God's presence and just giving up and surrendering to God. The moment of salvation is a being's first prayer. An important part of giving up is admitting that you know nothing about God. You don't know anything about God, and anything you pretend to know about God - the lies of belief and faith - keeps you from admitting that; it's all a barrier to the honesty of ignorance. Honest ignorance is a highly desirable state.
As soon as you can let yourself be absolutely honest about your ignorance, it'll begin to decrease. Very slowly at first, but it will begin to decrease. As long as you pretend to know something about God by clinging to some religious or "spiritual" story about what's what, that's what's in your way. You have to give that up; you have to admit that you don't know anything about God, anything at all before you can begin to know anything.
People who have made their way through that don't preach. People who are saved don't preach. They may offer what help they can, encouraging others to search for salvation and to find the truth of God in them; they may point out possibilities and warn about possible traps. But they won't try to convert you or tell you what's what with God because they know better. They know you have to save yourself, you have to go through what they went through, and they know that what was true for them won't be true for you; you have to find out for yourself. So anyone who preaches is bogus, and guilty of the sin of idolatry; preaching is trying to pass off some canned version of the truth, and the truth can't be canned. Everyone has to discover the truth for themselves.
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