I know a woman struggling with having an affair. Not the actual "having", but the idea of it. She ruminates about the man in question day and night. Should she, shouldn't she. She is married, has a daughter and the man she is fantasizing about is also married, though apparently he has made it clear that he is more than interested in her. The attraction is mutual, and there are all sorts of innuendos and near-misses — a brush against the hand, a bump in the hallway — all day at work.

She tells me the only reason she has been struggling with turning the idea into reality is because she has been held back by her ethics. She had been raised to believe that her word was her honor and that commitments were to be held sacred. Her early home life was devout if not technically religious. She was torn between her desire to "let go" and have fun and an innate sense of right and wrong. She was also raised to be a perfectionist — which ultimately ruins a good sense of duty and honor — and made to feel that everything was her responsibility, even when it wasn't. As a result, she feels internally twisted, pressured, as if there were knots all along her circulatory system. In truth, she enjoys very little unless her mood is enhanced by drugs and alcohol.

She asked me in near anguish, "Why can't I just be selfish like everyone else? I just wanna have fun for one minute. I know I will feel awful later, but I need something now."

I noticed two things in her question:

One, was that she seemed to be equating enjoyment with selfishness — that in order to be happy one had to become selfish. It would not be hard to make that assumption in our culture. Additionally, she seemed to have an underlying belief that selfishness — literally putting the "self" first — was something to aspire to, or worse, that there would be something worthwhile to gain by being selfish when everything in my personal and professional experience has taught me precisely the opposite. To my understanding, she was confusing self-care with self-centeredness.

The other thing I put in the form of a question:

"Do you know anything about addiction?"

She tilted her head, wondering why I asked something so seemingly irrelevant.

I said what she was saying reminded me so much of what addicts say when they need a fix. There is a moment in every addict's life in which this very profound turmoil becomes a conscious battle: Do I do what I know is right — it coincides with my values, it reflects long-term gain and health — or do I do what I feel like doing for short-term gain even though I know it will go against my beliefs, cause me and others pain, and otherwise complicate my life emotionally, mentally and fiscally?

Do I choose a full course meal that requires some forethought and preparation, or do I pop open the emotional Twinkie? It may look like food, it may even taste like food for a moment, but it's little more than an intra-psychic shot of dope that leaves us still hungry, empty and wondering what just happened. It makes me think of the first (and last) time I ate cotton candy. I remember so vividly the anticipation of all that pink sweetness only to find out that once I put it in my mouth it disappeared and made my teeth hurt.

This twinkie phenomenon has occurred more and more often in my office, so much so that I'm noticing a trend. I don't know why, and I have no studies that indicate anything notable. I do know that heroin is making a monstrous comeback, though. Perhaps they are both indications of something more profound and pervasive.

A Fast-Food/Fast-Feel Culture

As usual, when I am presented with a situation like this in people I look to both the internal motivations and the cultural supports for those motivations. Without the supports, many of these fancies would remain nothing but fancies or whims. They would not have the social buttressing to stay in place or to so smoothly and easily perpetuate the imagined behavior, like having an affair as opposed to having a moment of fantasy.

The internal motivation is simple to identify in most cases. A person might need relief, sex, food, support, love or belonging.

What does our culture do with these basic needs?

Still reeling from the "if it feels good, do it" ethos of the '60s, our social milieu says go get what you need — whatever it is, however you must. Who cares if you destroy your own life so long as you don't really hurt anyone else? One problem here is that more often than not, hurting oneself does actually hurt others in so many ways, both hidden and obvious — the emotional toll on those who care about us, the societal cost required to pick up hospital bills, the price of divorce and custody battles, insurance, police involvement, etc. This has bred a self-indulgent, self-involved couple of generations that is hard for me to fathom.

I was raised to work and to value not only the result of that work, but also the effort and process itself. I loathed dependency. I liked having my own. So I started working as soon as I could. When I was thirteen I started with filing in an office where my mother worked. Throughout school, I took on what I could find for the summers or after classes: secretarial, camp counselor, cashier, bra salesperson at Macy's 34th Street, waitress or whatever it took to pay my bills, get through school and have some cash to go to a movie. It was expected of me, both by my parents and by myself. And before I went to that movie or spent that cash, my own responsibilities were attended to. Period. Please understand, I was never deprived and had many blessings in my life, for which I'm eternally grateful. But there were no free rides.

A case in counterpoint:

Someone else I know whose judgment is usually fairly good forgot to use birth control, got his girlfriend pregnant, then got married before either of them had a job or career path. After the wedding he decided he needed a new car and a new home. Why not? That's what people do when they start families, right? That's what the people on TV do.

Would he be paying for it? Nope.

Did he want it? You bet. His plan? Get family members to take care of it. If I had gotten pregnant out of wedlock I would have had my head handed to me on a platter, not a spacious condo.

Worse, he is so good at making the situation look dire, it seems like the family is going to do exactly what he wants. So he will have his short-term needs — more space, sweeter transportation — met, while his more serious and long-term needs — individuation, maturity, responsibility and self-respect — are allowed to atrophy. He has substituted twinkies for food, quick satisfaction for nourishment, entitlement for autonomy.

My thoughts? Only one: Ye gads.

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She cried for a while and then she asked me: “What did I do wrong?”

At first I heard her as any therapist would. Many, many—too many—children blame themselves for the horror they are born into. Why? Mainly because the people who are hurting them tell them that “it’s all their fault” and because they are children, they simply don’t know any better than to believe them.

But then I heard something else. I heard the recurrent theme of a culture obsessed with success and the exterior trimmings of “wellbeing” as a manifestation of our inner grace, a culture that has rejected the entire idea of luck as the limping hope of the loser and has embraced the personal accountability of the Individual as All. This takes us to many places, not all of them bad, but decidedly not all of them good. This child was one example of what happens when personal accountability is perverted.

I had another client who had difficulties with finding work in a professional field. She went on interview after interview but she kept getting turned down. Finally, I asked her how she went to the interview—what time she showed up, how she dressed, how she spoke. “I go like this,” she said and waved her hands in front of herself proudly. “I go as myself.” She was dressed in flouncy pedal pushers, ankle socks, shoes that seemed way too comfortable (especially for an interview), and a short-sleeved shirt that stuck out of her waist. Her hair was pulled back in a tight pony tail. With every non-judgmental muscle in my mind working in reverse, I could not help but see her as responsible for her difficulty.

But what about luck? What about those people who seem to have all of it? And those others who seem to have none?

Yet another individual comes to mind: a young illegal immigrant who literally crawled here from south of the border. I mean what I said. She crawled on hands and knees through jungle and tunnel for miles, the only female with 40 men. She had been beaten mercilessly as a child. She had been taken by a man to be his wife without her consent and tormented by her husband for years. She had been tortured and thrown around so badly that she lost her eight-month pregnancy and spent a month in coma. She finally left because she was certain he would kill her and reluctantly left her only child with her mother. She grieves every day for that child. Was that her fault? Were her beatings a product of her own negative thinking? Would a couple of aphorisms have changed what she had to deal with? The family she was born into?

I think of another immigrant with a very different outcome. With a similar state of abject misery in his early childhood, he scrambled into this country by jumping cargo trains. Finally, starving, he turned himself into a slave laborer on farms across the southwest, drinking and drugging to oblivion. During those intoxicated years he committed a series of crimes for which he is deeply remorseful. But he—as opposed to our young mother—had the good fortune to 1) never get arrested and 2) marry a woman who stayed with him, who raised their daughter kindly, and kept a decent job. Then he had the even better fortune to have a moment of divine grace that got him to put down the drugs and alcohol for good. He cannot explain the moment or the grace. He just says, “In a second, it all changed.”

I mentioned my thoughts on this to my husband. I told him that I thought our culture had gone too far with the idealization of the self, that certain things are and will remain a mystery, that bad things happen and we very often don’t know why, that some idiots get all the girls and gold but some of the finest people on earth suffer in endless silence.

I asked him: Whatever happened to luck? Or Providence? Or mystery? Whatever happened to not having all the answers? Whatever happened to the simple compassion we should have for those who don’t have it as good as we do? When did we start lecturing the poor and sick on their lack of positivity and forgetting that we all stand on the edge of an abyss? When did we come to rely so heavily on the “power of intention” and turn our own cortical functions into a spiritual platform?

Does anyone really believe that Trump deserved all the money he inherited? That somehow his mental state was sufficiently advanced or positive and healthy enough that he “drew” that energy to him? I continued on my soapbox: When did we become masters of the universe, whether by our quantum minds or our technology? When did we start thinking that somehow we could control what was around us that way?

And in his typically Montanan manner, he said, “But life without that idea in some form is hopeless.”

Of course, as usual, he was right.

And as usual, things were never quite as linear or straightforward as I might have liked. Life is a mess. This issue is no exception.

A culture of control

Where it goes wrong is in degree. America is a culture of extremes and control. It is perfectly reasonable to say that one's choices make a difference or that one's thoughts have a profound impact on how one feels. It's an entirely different thing to insist that the self (whether that's my thoughts, my choices, my ideas) is all that matters in the formation of a life. There are way too many things that are beyond our control for this to be absolutely true. I may be able to manage my thoughts, but I can't change the global politic.

It also goes wrong in its reductionism. Things must be understood in linear ways. They must make sense, the columns must add up. If they don’t, it’s because we lost control and did something wrong. There must be someone or something to blame.

Two traditions perpetuate this:

1.     Calvinism and the doctrine of the elect/predestination;

2.     Eastern philosophy and the concept of Karma.

Both interpret our station in life (good or bad) as a function of either our grace or enlightenment. While “karma” is a relatively new ingredient in America’s philosophical soup, Calvinism’s doctrine of the elect permeates the American root system. In both systems, nothing is random or mysterious. Your good fortune is either God’s personal choice for you and you are obviously one of His favored, His elect or it is because of something you did or did not do in a past life. If you are poor and suffering, clearly you deserve it. If you’re not slim and simultaneously pushing a baby stroller while running a board of directors, there’s something awry. And that can mean there’s something wrong with you now (your intentions are weak or not right) or there was something wrong with you a hundred years ago and you’re paying for it now.

Some people interpret this to an extreme.

I remember a woman at an animal training workshop I took some years ago. It involved some psychological techniques that were much like Cesar Milan’s dog whispering. Somehow the conversation got diverted to the spiritual state of animals, particularly dogs. That woman told a story about a dog who was always tied to a tree, who was clearly in pain, and was often neglected or beaten. I piped right up: “And you got him, right?”

She said, “Of course not. How do I know it’s not his destiny, that he’s supposed to be there because of something he needs to learn?”

She smiled, quite satisfied with how spiritual she sounded. I nearly jumped out of my seat. I do not suffer fools gladly and I especially do not easily tolerate the smug, intellectual dismissal of pain and need in others—particularly children and animals.

The power of proper rather than positive thinking

One of the most important pioneers in Mind-Body medicine, oncologist Dr. O. Simonton had a unique perspective on thinking and healing. Quite a while back he was asked which individuals were more likely to survive cancer. It was clear that the author of the question assumed Simonton would say, “but of course, the positive thinkers.” He didn’t. He said that pure (sic: unbelievable) positive thinking (“I am healed,” for instance) actually worked against patients as much as grossly negative thinking (“I’m dying; there’s no hope”). What seemed to make a difference was what he called realistic thinking. When a person could believably say to him- or herself that everything was being done to help and they were doing everything they could to be better and healthier every day, they seemed to cross a threshold—from the fanciful into the possible, which is where real hope exists.

I say a prayer (often) that I’m sure most of you know: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.

To me this is truly hopeful. This puts an appropriate percentage of responsibility in my hands. This says I can do something, but not everything. I can do what I can do and I will. I can use imagery to help myself heal (yes, that works). I can use proper medicine (I choose classical homeopathy).  I can pray. I can eat right. I can sleep, play and work in balance. I can choose to forgive and stay in gratitude. I can use the tools I am given with all my heart and all my strength.

What I can’t do is lie to myself. I can’t use my thoughts to manipulate others, create opportunities that don’t exist, or generate mounds of cash in a toppling economy because “I’m worth it.” I can’t pretend that everything makes sense or that all suffering is self-generated. I can’t make the columns add up when this universe doesn’t add up. I can’t believe that a child who was nearly killed by her own parents somehow merited that because of something she did.

I can believe that the young woman who crawled here from South America did nothing to “deserve” her pain but that, with help and patience, she can find ways through it and possibly even to correct it. When I last heard from her, a fund was being taken up by people she had met in this country to help her get her child and mother to safety. It was a spontaneous and unexpected act of love and kindness just when she had nearly lost all hope.

I believe that good things happen in the same way as bad things—mysteriously and surprisingly. I believe with all my heart that everything does have a purpose, that I can have a personal relationship with God, and that eventually what is wrong will be made right. But I don’t know how or when. In the meantime, I ride the waves of good and bad as they come without pronouncing judgment about them or using them as philosophical weapons of self-justification.

In the documentary film, “What the Bleep Do We Know?” one of the doctors interviewed said he had a hard time with aphorisms and, to paraphrase him, he found them vapid and unbelievable. What he could say to himself and what allowed him to be hopeful, sometimes courageous, and hard working, was this simple idea: “I can always be surprised by how good it gets.”

Amen.

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Death Fear: Why Do We

Dread Being Dead?

A New American Phenomenon

I spent probably the first half of my life in one or the other state of acute fear. Due to a variety of circumstances, one of them asthma, I came to know the fear of imminent death. It was so visceral, so primordial and pre-verbal, it still defies description for me. I can fully understand why someone would do almost anything to make that feeling stop and to live his life as if death were someone else's problem. But over the years, as I've gotten healthier, I've become less and less afraid. I don't believe that was just because of my improved physical state. There were at least a few times that I thought death was possible if not within proximity. On looking back, it seems to me that the process actually worked in reverse. I think I became healthier because I became less afraid. In particular, I became less afraid of death. One reader, Synduatic, commented on one of my recent Huffington Post blogs on suffering. He implied that a good portion of our well-being stems from our ability to meet death. He paraphrased a few great thinkers who concluded that to avoid death was to avoid a free life: A rich philosophical tradition, to which you gave passing reference, surrounds these ideas, too. Plato said that philosophy is a meditation on and a preparation for death; Seneca said that he or she who learns how to die unlearns slavery; and Montaigne said that to philosophize is to learn how to die. I had to agree. He pointed to a deep fracture in the American psyche because there is no culture that shuns death (or suffering) the way ours does. And what we shun, we fear. And what we fear controls us.

The rest is at the link above.

Blessings to all.

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Be still…It’s really such a simple request and such an impossibly difficult task for so many of us as we get older and more acculturated.  It certainly has been for me. I can barely talk on the phone for 15 minutes without washing the dishes or multi-tasking in some other way. America is a culture of action.  We do. We don’t sit.

The problem is that with constant busy-ness comes chronic spiritual insensibility. We can build things, accumulate things, and get from one point on a line to another faster than any other group of people on Earth. We are the cleverest, quickest, and most acquisitive culture in our planet’s history. But we see, feel, and understand less. We have collected data and sacrificed wisdom. We have built colossal glass cities and relinquished our sight.

By the time we are in high school, probably earlier, most of us are set into a rhythm of living. Our eyes are focused ahead and our peripheral vision shrinks with each passing year until we can barely see the tips on our own noses. And unless we can see not only ourselves but ourselves in context, the truth is that we can know very little. It becomes more and more difficult to see any evidence of God, no less know Him. Unless, of course, we’re in deep trouble and a sense of urgency is dramatically renewed.  As one Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church has said, “Unless there is thunder, people don’t make the sign of the cross.” The American equivalent: “Everyone believes in God in the trenches.”

Yet, we are continually surrounded by the evidence. We are in a world filled with miracles. Clues are in every corner of our lives. Amma, the Hugging Saint of India, exclaimed that God is everywhere: “If you ask me who is God, I tell you, you are my god. The lion is god. The flowers are god.” Yet most of us don’t see it. Or don’t recognize these clues as such if we do see them. Some of us just forget to look.  But miracles are not empirical. They do not present themselves in the linear, organized manner of double-blind studies. We try but we cannot collect miracle data to analyze. Most people think they will believe it when they see it, but the truth is that we see it when we believe it or are at least willing to entertain the possibility. This is what is meant in Mathew and why we must be as little children to see the truth in the evidence that is all around us.

Two experiences have illustrated to me the urgency of keeping my eyes and mind open.

The first experience occurred when I was 12 years old and I was allowed to take an after-school art class. It was a small, unpretentious event held in the backroom of an old woman’s apartment in the Bronx but it changed the way I saw everything. Instead of looking at a thing and seeing its function first (how it pertained to me, how I could use it, eat it, play with it), it now had a life and a charge all its own. I saw light, form, color, shade, placement in its surroundings. If I tilted my head this way or that, the thing—and all those aspects of it—also tilted. I was suddenly in relationship with the world in a new way.

The second was studying for nearly five years to become a homeopath after already being a psychotherapist for about ten years. Classes would not start until we had all closed our eyes and sat still for a period of time, sometimes for as much as a half-hour. Even as I write this some years later, it hardly sounds like much—what’s a half-hour? But for me sitting still and letting myself be quiet so that I could receive impressions from my patients without actually collecting them, without any judgment or interference on my part was initially as easy as teaching a puppy not to run after a rabbit.  But by my last year (and it was a struggle every time) I began to notice something odd—I started to see more. Information was not just more available, it was clearer and more understandable. This, I began to understand, was where the miracles were to be found.

But understanding was far from enough for me. Humans are a complex and mixed bag of needs, desires and defects. Poised precariously between good and evil, heaven and hell, life and death, dangling between light and dark, the human heart is by nature a busy place, a shifting ground where there is both endless dance and relentless battle.

Stillness does not come easy for me.

I do not sit with much grace.

I have had to find a way to be still of heart and let my body move as it will. So, I do yoga. I walk in meditation and I pray as I hike. Sometimes on those hikes I talk. Sometimes I listen. Sometimes I’m hurt and fearful. Sometimes I’m grateful and delighted. All I can do is bring myself—all of me—to Him, assuming that He can handle it, the awe, the anger, the confusion, the good, the indifferent, all of it, all of me, from the loftiest impulses to the darkest corners of my soul. And what I found was unexpectedly simple: Finding God was like being married. You have to show up for the relationship. All of you. Build it and they will come. The same is true of God.

Be there and He will come.

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It moves the market because it moves us to buy. We believe we need something because we get convinced that the absence of it puts us at grave risk—for attack, hemorrhoids, loneliness, heart failure or social scorn. We pour more pharmaceuticals into our bodies than ever, yet we have more heart disease, panic attacks, isolation, and asthma in this country than ever before. And with all the surveillance, bombs, and barricades we’ve erected around us we are still the most frightened we’ve ever been—which is exactly where Madison Avenue wants us.

Because when we’re afraid, we’re needy. And when we’re needy like that, we’ll buy anything. Including bad ideas.

The second American disease follows the first in both style and substance. It is consumption–not the tubercular one that plagued the weak, poor and malnutritioned in the late 1800's, but the modern, psychological version of it in which we never have enough.

What's in your garage? In your cabinets? When you walk through your neighborhood, what do you see in their yards, their storage areas? How much of it do you think you (or they) actually use in  a year, in a decade? My assumption–if my experience is anything like yours–is that you use very little of what you have. And that you need even less than that.

This is the delusion of I NEED MORE. It is unrestrained avarice and growth. We guzzle without compunction. On the physical level, you have cancer, psoriasis and diabetes. Our garages are filled to overflowing, but on the emotional and spiritual level we are becoming bankrupt.

The origin of it is subtle. You—me—we identify with what we HAVE more than we identify with who we are and what we offer to our communities. If we don’t have the clothing, the car, or the house that reflects our chosen image to the world, we have nothing. Worse, we ARE nothing.

It is fear based from start-to-finish. Imagine the way America does business, exchanging credit cards, credit card offers, percentages of interest, interest reports, people with their heads in their hands weeping over piles of bills, advertisers for more credit.

Because of our need for MORE, our whole culture is now based on one of the few economic devices the Bible completely disallows: usury. Yet, we can’t stop putting things on credit. We can’t sit still. We can’t be with one another quietly. We have to keep buying, acquiring, collecting.

Our shelves and stomachs are filled but our hearts and souls are empty. We sit alone and sip on our Prozac cocktails.

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People think that hypnotherapists only put people INTO trance. But a vastly significant percentage of the work a good hypnotherapist does is help people OUT of the unhealthy trances they’re in. Take a look around and see if it isn’t so! Who doesn’t have an IPOD attached to their head or a phone on their ear? Who isn’t spending hours staring at a TV or hooked into the internet. Our culture is now almost entirely media driven—we’re surrounded (all the time!) by advertising, media, and even music that tells us what we need, who to love, and what drugs to take to make us happy.

We don’t know who we are or what we’re doing here, but we are convinced that Viagra or a breast implant will somehow make it all better.

There are more pervasive cultural delusions that I can go through in one post but this is a brief list. We'll go through each one of them in a series.

1. Viral Fear

2. Moritis

3. The Eruption of Ugly

4.The I'm-1-N-1 Virus

5. Flushing's Disease

All of these are pandemic in proportion and are driving American culture headlong into the critical care unit. Is there a fix for them? I think so.  Stay tuned.

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Then the other day I saw an ad in Delta's flight magazine. It read:  The five things that stand between busy professionals and dating: Work. Work. Work. Work. Work.

And I wondered: Why are we working so much?

And I answered that pretty quickly: To buy stuff. Mostly stuff we will outgrow or throw out in a year or stuff we don't need at all.

Fine, then. But we're tired. Why don't we rest?

I mentioned it to my husband.

And he answered, "Because there's no sabbath anymore. We'll rest when we have no choice."

Well, why don't we have a sabbath? Americans are an overwhelmingly religious group of people and most do have some sort of affiliation with a church, a synagogue, a mosque, a temple, a tribal group. Something that gives them a structure. Almost all have philosophies that stress balance and the cultivation of quiet time as part of worship.

Then, the thought struck me: What if democracy killed the sabbath? What if we don't have a sabbath because we have so many different ones? How do you keep the stores closed on Sunday without accidentally penalizing Jews, Seventh-Day Adventists, and Muslims who would rather close stores on Saturday or Friday? And vice versa? What started as a way of honoring diversity has become a capitalist cramp–now we all have to keep working all the time.

I decided to do an informal survey of colleagues and friends who range from doctors to social workers to teachers of theology, priests, and lawyers. I asked them a few questions:

Do you feel a day of rest is a good idea? Should that include shutting down businesses for the day and giving people who work in the retail industry a chance to rest as well?

What day would be a good day? And why?

Many Christians said to keep it on Sunday since the majority of the United States is Christian of one denomination or another.

One woman–a very diplomatic social worker–said to choose a universal sabbath that was neither a friday, a saturday, or a sunday and that anyone who wanted another day off could take one without penalty from an employer.

Another woman suggested having a 4-day work week, which she believed was not only a good idea emotionally and spiritually, but environmentally. This sounds like a great idea if you work for someone else, travel to work by car, or don't need the money at the moment.  Many local governments are, in fact, opting for this because it lowers their maintenance costs significantly. If, however, you're paying a mortgage and raising a family and can't afford to work fewer hours or you're running your own business and every day you're not open, you're not earning, things become complicated once again.

What to do?

So far, the universal solution has eluded me. But, personally, I take one day a week and dedicate it to one part quiet contemplation and prayer and two parts outdoors. On that day, work stops. I don't shop. I've also made the decision that when I am sick I will (and do) wait till I'm well to go back to work. If that means I make less, so be it. The decision to have a Sabbath, whichever day it is, is a deicision about priorities. On that day, money, stuff, and bottom lines take a back seat to God and home and friendship.

In fact, the latest data support this as a basis for overall happiness. While gross national product is important in predicting the wellbeing of a country, it's actually personal productivity that weighs in highest.

According to one study: "Wealth alone does not bring the greatest degree of happiness. Norway has the highest GDP per capita on the list — $98,822 — yet it ranked ninth, not first. On the other hand, New Zealand's happiness level is 76.7 out of 100 on the OECD list, but its 2009 GDP per capita is $30,556."  In an editorial British Medical Journal (Delamothe, 2005), he noted that research done in numerous countries shows that while people may get richer, they don't get happier. " It is family, social and community networks that bring joy to one's life," according to Delamothe.

The OECD data shows that another important factor is work-life balance. While Scandinavian countries boast a high GDP per capita, the average workweek in that part of the world is no more than 37 hours. In China, which got a low score of just 14.8, the workweek is 47 hours and theGDP per capita is just $3,600.

Working too much seems to be the American Way, but it doesn't seem to be working very well. As the Chinese are rapidly finding out.

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He seemed confused.

I said, "Let's talk about brainwashing. Do you think you haven't been brainwashed up to this point?" I looked at the group and called upon them to consider the pharmaceutical companies, the tobacco industry, Madison Avenue, and the hold that beer has on the American economy and then to talk to me about brainwashing.

They sat quietly for a while and then the fellow who had complained shrugged amiably and said, "I never thought about that. I guess you have a point."

The point is one that is missed by most of us every time we walk into Wal-Mart or choose a product because of the advertising image with which its been endowed by virtue of millions of dollars and selectively researched media placement. We are constantly being sold. Usually we are being sold by fear–the fear of not being good enough, thin enough, smart enough, sexy enough, big enough, tough enough, rich enough, or hip enough. Sometimes it is by the fear of loss. Sometimes by the fear of exclusion. Often by the simple threat of death. And I know few people who are not a little afraid of that. Of course, the insurance companies have the answer to that. But, still no one feels secure.

We are sold shirts, bras, Viagra, and cars, TV's we don't need, pills they tell us we do (even though they may cause lymphoma). We are sold insurance and reverse mortgages and stuff to fill our garages till our cars don't fit.

And we buy. Because we are afraid. And people like the one in my group think that the cure is the disease. Recovery–from addiction, alcoholism or viral fear–is a detox of the mind, a de-trancing, an awakening from a video-induced sloth and media-induced greed that has made us the softest, fattest country on the planet. And so few are happy. We get more and more stuff, but less and less joy.

What we long for is simple. We long for love and purpose, a spiritual meaning in life. In all my years I've never met a bra, a pill, a diet plan or a bottle that ever made good on that promise.

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