21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T W E N T Y - O N E L E V E L S

preoccupation with death, with the putting off of death, or with clinging to death-filled objects. By sinning in this way we refuse to fall in love with life, to love what is loveable, to savour life’s non-elitist pleasure, to celebrate the blessings of life, to return thanks for such blessings by still more blessing…

‘The sin of consumerism is a child of the sin of emission of Eros. When religion fails to celebrate authentic Eros in our lives, we fall in love with ersatz pleasures which are subject/object pleasures which can be bought and sold but do not satisfy.’

From this, a contrast can be made between celebration as an ‘aim’ — which is really just pleasure-seeking — and a deeper sense of what it means to celebrate. This is something akin to the contrast made between beauty of a superficial kind as compared to beauty that speaks of a deep ‘rightness’ within people, creatures or things. Like beauty and morality, celebration can easily be made into a thing to which we then aspire; a commodity that we might acquire. How can we, by contrast, be the celebration of the world? It is clearly linked to Brian Swimme’s ‘being pleasure for others’ and in finding delight in all things.

We are in a process of becoming, but also we have already become (when looked at from the ‘view from eternity’ — to use Spinoza’s phrase). We are already all that we ever need to be! (Even Grace Jantzen, whose work was examined in some detail earlier, has an element of becoming — of process — in her work. Just be!) So, we could start by celebrating ourselves! Imperfect, precarious, frail, vulnerable, confused, or all of the above. All of this is

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