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

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of Christianity. ‘Recovery of ecstasy’ is just an abstraction and places pleasure as always somehow beyond us. Why not instead the familiar animal pleasures of ‘feeble flesh’? The occasional blue sky, sunshine, rest, companionship, idleness? Real life is made up of these haphazard pleasures — not a sterile eternal happiness of epic proportions.

The state of our soul and who we are in our essence are not things given to us to know. We inevitably have a delusion of who we are and sometimes this is greatly at odds with how others see us. The delusion may be harmless enough and it might actually make us ‘better’ people in terms of being good citizens and morally upright, but it is a delusion nonetheless. Or maybe the delusion we have of ourselves needs to be examined and called into question. Four aspects of self-analysis were identified from Erich Fromm and noted that there is a lot that we would be best to let go of — if only to make ourselves happier, let alone being any use to others or to the world at large.

Seeing ourselves a little and letting go is the place to start — the means by which our essence finds its adventure in the world. It is not about trying; striving to do something that is not yet achieved. It is opening a space within ourselves that allows the grace already in the world to become manifest to others and to ourselves.

Simon Parke addresses this point:

‘The world is not the problem…the world is quite perfect. It is the performers who are the

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