In Pursuit of Phantoms
“The Lord may forgive us our sins, but our nervous system never does,” says William James.
So many people are so confused about what happiness is really. You can buy any number of articles off the shelf for equally every kind of need, except the kind of real need – happiness – that people lack in this wounded, aching world.
Additives to what nature has already offered man are the seedbed for life’s resentments, frictions and fears. One of the worst additives to life is worry. Worrying about happiness.
Why are we such fools?
The Bible and the Quaran agree that man was created in the best of morals, endowed with understanding, pure affection and spiritual insight, and a will to freely choose. But man fell from unity with grace and, according to the Quaran, chose to follow the crooked path of discord. Since then, he has continuously deserted truth and rejected reality. Now, he lives in arrogance, selfishness and untruth, fraud and profanity.
Alas! Man, debauched by excessive greed and insanity, has turned nature’s creation of gifts upon their head and into elegant destructive attitudes.
Many people avoid true happiness as soon as they start worrying about not having one thing or the other; the starting block for the pursuit of phantoms. They worry so much, about nothing necessary, that they miss sleep and soon enough they start having stomach and mental haemorrhage.
If you don’t know how to fight and conquer worry and gain happiness, you are sure to die young, says Nobel prize winner in medicine, Dr. Alexis Carrel.
A lot of people nowadays are collapsing under the burden of emotional sickness and nervous breakdowns. Everyone is in this bracket of high-voltage anguish, emotional friction and the rush to amass personal wealth in pursuit of fake happiness – civil servants, law enforcement officials, tax collectors, housewives, doctors, bricklayers, cart pushers, drivers and the whole lot are victims of nervous indigestion, which often, and very quickly moreover, lead to any number of paralysis. And death.
Once you start off worrying about possessions or you surrender to supreme selfishness, hatred, envy, jealousy and all the like, or choose high-tension life to show off, you have started buying success with high blood pressure, heart troubles and gastritis (worry eating your stomach lining). You will gain the whole world and lose the whole of your health. And happiness. What a bargain!
Even if you owned the whole world and all the houses, cars, dresses and food in it, you will have to sleep in only one bed at a time, drive one car at a time, wear one dress at a time, however many times you changed in a day, and eat only three meals a day, if only you will have the time and appetite. All these in excess are firm sources of worry and a sure way of killing happiness.
If you want to see what worry does to people, you don’t have to go to a hospital or a documentation centre. Just look out the window of your office, if you have one, or watch the street and you will see people weighed down by loads of frayed nerves like the wealthy businessman who worried himself through a series of maladies and literally dropped dead when his heart failed while he tried to take a little air at a resort.
The man had amassed stinking billions and fell dead at just 58. But before that he had used hundreds of thousands to hold the lid down on high blood pressure that was threatening to blow his heart. After he stabilised, the doctors told him he had worrying diabetes. He used millions on the diabetes and brought it under control. But as soon as he got back a little spring in his feet, the gastric juices of his stomach started eating the lining of his stomach. He worked so hard trying to repair the damage that he wished he hadn’t a stomach in the first place. When some smart money-doublers duped him, the sugar in his blood and urine shot up. The man had taken the affairs of wealth into his blood stream. Sudden death laid all his problems to rest. When he saw the first sign of a stroke, he was dead. He was buried without a franc. He had worried himself into an untimely grave.
