What do you want?

Do you want to feel better or do you want a worthwhile life?

A worthwhile life is one that maximises the deployment of one's skills, experience, and energy for the good of all.

Many worthwhile lives are extremely tough on the individual, but a deeper satisfaction beyond thrills and comfort is provided over the long term.

If you just want to feel better, it's probably not worth bothering at all with the programme, and the world of medicine provides many products that will directly change how you feel. Not to mention sugar, caffeine, sex, roller-coasters, television (= Valium with a plug), gambling, Las Vegas generally, and computer 'games'.

Regarding feelings: the purpose is as part of a situational navigational system. Poisons cause pain; reproduction causes pleasure. Creatures guided by the avoidance of poison and the pursuit of procreation will be more likely to pass on their genes. Evolution in action.

Back to the present: if someone criticises you and you feel under threat, your navigational system is broken. You are not under threat. Your ego is. Such feelings are 'authentic' in that they are happening but they do not authentically reflect reality and they do not perform any useful function.

Some people talk of 'honouring feelings'. Feelings are not brave little soldiers, noble public servants, or rare orchids to be placed on a pedestal and admired; they're data to be mined. Most feelings derive directly from the ego. Honour them and you're honouring the ego, buddy. NB your ego is not your amigo.

Also, if you're feeling bad now because of something in the past, you're a dummy. The feeling was a voice on the GPS that said turn left or turn right. If you missed the turning, hard luck. Listen more carefully next time. Don't keep looping the voice in your head or you'll miss the next turning. Such feelings are not authentic. They're a delusional avoidance of present reality by mentally reconstructing a past situation (which one likely misinterpreted anyway) and then reliving it perpetually like Miss Haversham or a '78 stuck at the end of the disc.

'The horror of that moment,' the King went on, 'I shall never, never forget!'

'You will, though,' the Queen said, 'if you don't make a memorandum of it.'

Rather than honouring feelings, I use them to help determine what God's will is for me and to determine where the ego-spewing bullshit factory that is my brain is out to sabotage The Mission.

Purpose: so I can maximise my usefulness and not have myself dragged down by authentic-inauthentic feelings grabbing at my skirts like a Dickensian rabble of starving, rapacious street urchins.