Frustration: The Universal Disease

Chapter 3: Scientific Proof of the Existence of God Will Not Be Announced by the White House

Frustration: The Universal Disease

Fundamentally, the conditions of experience are not organized around our passive, random, and casual participation, but they oblige us to conscious, responsible, and active participation. To the degree we do not live consciously, responsibly, and actively, we are confronted and overwhelmed by the random force of events. If our will or responsible intention is weak, neither casual inclinations nor essential functional needs will tend to be satisfied by our passively attained circumstances. And even if we become consciously and responsibly active, full of intention in the world, the forces of the material and psychic circumstance of the world will always bear upon us, yielding only occasional and partial fulfillment of our personal desires.

Therefore, frustration of the individual is a basic fact in the Realm of Nature. At best we may enter into the stream of changes, through right intention and appropriate action, but we will in any case more or less constantly suffer the frustration borne upon us by the stresses of the world-changes, which have no ultimate tendency to satisfy or eternalize individuals. The Force of Life we intuit to be within us is moved by our willful or desiring acts to create circumstances of fulfillment. But that Life is truly Universal and All-Pervading, not inward and personal. Therefore, if that Life is manipulated by inward motives to satisfy personal desires of all kinds, not only will that satisfaction be only occasional and mostly partial – but the Force of Life will itself be frustrated, since it cannot fulfill its Universal or All-Pervading Function or Realize its Transcendental Freedom.

Also, when human beings gather in large collectives, or orders of State, a design is brought to the possibilities of experience, and the collective order moves on in its daily fashion, even if the individual lapses into a passive mood. Thus, it is possible for individuals in any social order to succumb to a chronically frustrated mood, and yet their mechanical or passive participation will be sufficient for at least a minimal satisfaction of ordinary personal desires. Indeed, where the State becomes a great worldly power, and the individual is controlled and limited beyond any hope of truly creative and free movement, either psychically or physically, then every individual is essentially obliged to the mode of passive or mechanical participation. And such is the tendency and common option of most individuals in the world today.

The Wisdom-Culture of Man at Infinity has been arrested all over the world. Everywhere, individuals are dominated by subhuman powers. The politics of human life has been brought under the control of salt-of-the-earth ideologies and gross scientific or technological machines of State. The truly spiritual understanding of Man is suppressed in every area of common education, and official voices are present everywhere to anathematize the deep visions and urges of the higher material, psychic, and spiritual or Transcendental dimensions of the human gesture in the world. Truly, it is always more or less so in the human world, but it is also clearly so at the present time.

The result of this suppression of Man by Nature and by the State is the appearance of a universal and chronic disease. It is frustration, or depression of Life. Everyone suffers this chronic depression, and everyone must struggle to overcome it. But the effects of the propagandistic subhuman powers of the world tend to minimize the conscious, responsible, and active mode of individual participation in the stream of experiential events. We tend to be passively or helplessly aligned to “what is,” because our Force of Life is frustrated, in doubt, crippled by a profound despair, which is always present, even if concealed under an exterior gloss of enthusiasm and competence.

Both Nature and the State demonstrate an acknowledgment of the limits of the individual capacity for the frustration of Life. Thus, a minimum but vulgar satisfaction is commonly held out as the constant promise of daily living-if only one will be calm and accept the passive role of mechanical participation in the game of limits proposed by Nature and the State.

But only the most unconscious and childish people can be satisfied by such a meagre destiny. And, for this reason, both Nature and the State are engaged in a perpetual machine of effort to “clone” as many controllable and minimal human individuals as possible. Even so, the usual man cannot easily tolerate the perpetual round of Life-frustration. Therefore, Nature and the State allow some few consoling indulgences that function as periodic and temporary relief, enabling frustration to be discharged in occasional degenerative outbursts.

Nature provides the possibilities of degenerative self-indulgence abundantly, but the State must control these means, or else the mass of frustrated humanity would resort to constant intoxication and become uncontrollable or unproductive. Thus, highly stimulating substances, to be taken internally, as well as highly stimulating entertainments, or outward distractions, are allowed, but more or less controlled by the State. The minimally stimulating substances (such as killed meat food, manufactured or artificial delights, tobacco, and so forth) are minimally controlled. But more intensely stimulating substances are always the subject of controls and even absolute suppression. Thus, alcohol, hallucinogenic drugs, and so forth are always the subjects of preoccupation by the State. Likewise, minimally stimulating and useful propagandistic entertainments, such as television, movies, popular literature, and even the press, are in “spirit” controlled but generally, at least in the West, only minimally suppressed by the State. They are, in general, even exploited by the State. But intensely stimulating “entertainments,” such as orgiastic sexual indulgence, criminal violence, and anarchism, are always strictly controlled and suppressed by the State. And the exploitation of these subjects by the otherwise popular media is also strictly controlled, or else, where direct control is difficult, there is constant propagandistic preoccupation, on the part of the State, or the official social media, against such exploitation of sex, crime, and anarchy.

Since the State depends on its power to control the indulgence of individuals in intensely stimulating or intoxicating experiences, which tend to orient people toward unproductive self-centeredness rather than coordinated social productivity, the State also tolerates and often promotes a degree of “religion.” Every individual can, through social propaganda and various psychological media, be made at least occasionally critically aware that chronic indulgence in self-centered stimulants, internal and external, is degenerative and antisocial. And Nature provides the core of mortal fear necessary for the rest of the power of the conventional religious argument.

Likewise, the highly technological or scientifically propagandized social order can provide “religious” consolations of its own. Ordinary religion is an argument against the personal and social effects of intoxicated or chaotic self-indulgence (most prominently in alcohol, hallucinogenic drugs, sex, and criminal or anarchistic violence). And such religion is also an argument for the possibility of release from the conditions we tend most to fear-particularly pain, death, and absolute frustration of the pleasurable sense of existence. In less technological or scientifically propagandized societies, religion appears in its conventional form, which is a system of mythological beliefs or glamorous psychological persuasions toward positive social inclinations, or conventional “morality,” which is conceived as a means to acquire both satisfaction while alive and immortal pleasures after death. In technological and scientifically propagandized societies, religion appears more in the form of another myth-the myth of “real” or “demythologized” knowledge-along with elaborate technological and political strategies for healing, pleasuring, and even immortalizing people.

But religion is tolerable to the State only to a degree and in a certain mode. The mythological and technological consolations are tolerable only to the degree they reinforce positive and productive social behavior-and they are intolerable to the degree they produce autointoxication, or obsession with mystical and poetic revery. Thus, the State in general propagandizes against the deep psychological, higher psychic, and mystical phenomena associated with the more profound reaches of religion and the radical contemplation of the world by the individual. (All knowledge must be “official,” and thus propagandized by the common media of the social and verbal mind, not the private and nonrational media of the psyche.)

If all of this is understood to be true, then what alternative may be offered! If the frustration of Man is even the business of both Nature and the State, then what is the alternative to frustration, despair, chaotic and degenerative self-indulgence, and autointoxication! The answer is that there is no alternative to all of that, unless the individual Awakens to the Transcendental Truth in which the phenomena of Nature (or the world of the body-mind) are arising. And if individuals so Awaken in sufficient numbers, then the functions of the State may become the responsibility of the Wise, or the Friends of Man.

Only if Transcendental Wisdom moves the State can the State cease to be the subhuman Oppressor of subhumanity. The State need not be destroyed, any more than the Realm of Nature must or even can be destroyed. But just as the Play of Nature, or the experiential body-mind, must be transcended, the conventional or subhuman order must be transcended. The world must become the Domain of the Wise (those who are adapted to a degree of functional realization that is more than human), and those who are Elders in the Way of Wisdom must also become the acknowledged Masters of Man. Devotees of the Living God must accept responsibility for the social and cultural order of human experience, and the Wisdom of Transcendental Divine Realization must, with all of its Lawful and practical understanding, become the root of all common education.

The usual man, who is mechanically and passively, if fitfully or neurotically, associated with the conventions of daily experience, is the subject of profound frustration of the Force and Condition of Life. The Life that appears to move him is inherently moved to Realize its Transcendental Condition of Radiant Bliss, the Freedom of Absolute Consciousness. And that Radiant Life would even Radiate as the world and as the body-mind of Man, except that the Force of that Absolute Radiance is confused with the independent self-position of the mortal individual, and thus it is constantly frustrated by all the petty limitations of functionally and socially organized desire and energy.

Therefore, the Condition of our Life must be Realized. We must not merely be filled with Life. The self that seeks to be filled must become a sacrifice. The individual must become Ecstatic, or self-released. We must function in the mode of self-transcendence rather than self-indulgence.

If we Awaken to the Truth of the Living God, then we will cease to be inherently frustrated, since Life is thus released from binding identification with the conventional self or body-mind. And if we persist in such Awakening, or whole bodily Enlightenment, then we will also cease to be chronically frustrated, since we will be conscious, responsible, and active in the midst of the stream of experience.

Until that Awakening, we may crave the ordinary instruments whereby individuals commonly relieve their sense of inherent and chronic frustration. Thus, we may crave self-indulgent and degenerative exploitation of stimulating substances, such as killed meat food, tobacco, alcohol, and hallucinogenic drugs, or stimulating activities, such as degenerative erotic sexuality, and even criminal or anarchistic violence. But if we Awaken to the Bliss of the Living God, then we are inherently released from such cravings, and we may quickly grow out of all our chronic dependence on such degenerative associations.

Likewise, if we Awaken to the Way of the Radiant Transcendental Consciousness, the Way of the Bliss of the Living God, we will be inherently free of the need or the persuasion of conventional religion, all the suggestive consolations of mere objective scientism, and the absurd propagandistic or humanly depressive uses of gross technology. And we will be free to enter into a truly moral relationship with the world and with the society of human individuals. We will cease to be motivated by self-centered desire, and our movements will become conscious, responsible expressions of Ecstasy, or true God-Communion. We will be full of inherent pleasure, and free of chronic obsession with all the degenerative means of acquiring the sense of pleasure that the inherent frustrations of Life chronically exclude.

Likewise, free of false religion (which only motivates and controls and further deludes frustrated or childish and adolescent people), we will become inherently oriented toward the true religious or spiritual process of Life. We will naturally enter into the ecstatic mystical expansion that is structurally inevitable in Man. And we will ultimately transcend the psychic or mystical phenomena of the body-mind, even as we first transcend the physical or vital and elemental as well as ordinary or lower mental phenomena of our experience.

Thus liberated, we will transcend the illusions that all conventional religions and technologies conceal. We will not look for Freedom via magic, just as we will not look to degenerative self-indulgence for Bliss. We will not regard the inner or psychic dimension of the body-mind to be separate from and merely magically related to the body or the world of natural relations. We will observe the Life-Power that is subtler than the gross physical, but we will also Realize that the Power of Life is truly operative only in the simultaneity of the body-mind, or the cooperation of body and mind, rather than the domination of one by the other.

Even the Spiritual Master does not heal by magical means. Rather, he works to Awaken responsibility at the heart, the center of both body and mind. At times, the Spiritual Master, or the Divine Power, may appear to Awaken individuals suddenly, or to heal them so quickly that no natural process seems to have been involved. But this does not truly imply any magical activity – only suddenness of the simultaneous Awakening of body and mind, or the Principle of the heart.

There is no spiritual Awakening, nor any true healing or change of Man, unless the heart, or the body-mind as a whole, is coincidentally or simultaneously Awakened. Thus, most of the changes developed in individuals through surrender to the Living God and the Agency of the Spiritual Master are gradual, rather than sudden. In general, time is required for the various parts of the body-mind to be purified, enlivened, changed, and integrated with all other parts, coincident with the Life-Power at the heart. There is no true Awakening without a change of heart, a literal purification, a redress of wrongs, and a change of habits.

In summary, Man is subhuman until he Awakens from mere desire, or self-indulgence, to Love, or self-transcendence, in constant Communion with the Living God and in Lawful or responsible management of all functional and relational conditions of experience. The Awakened or true Man is inherently Free of all the frustrating limitations of Nature and the State. He is Radiant in the world, so that the Transcendental Reality is alive as him. Therefore, a world of human beings so Awakened may create a truly benign and moral Culture, or true State, founded in the Wisdom-Influence of the Radiant Transcendental Consciousness. And only human beings so Awakened and so ordered are free of the inherent and chronic frustrations that produce subhuman societies, subhuman cravings, and subhuman destinies, before and after death.