My parents were very concerned because I was not willing to accept the Devil or Satan or Demons. And to me God was everything, that was the point I was living, finding out practically what it means to be the Image and Likeness of God.
But at the same time I was exposed to the forces of this world, which includes seeking of pleasure and happiness. This would entail partying hard and exploring sexuality - both of which I did extensively in the endeavour of understanding ‘Why does that feel good’, and ‘What is wrong with it if it feels good’. Isn’t that the whole story of the pursuit of happiness and then if that is what makes you happy, how can what makes you happy, be wrong?
That is a contradiction to the whole idea of being placed here and to explore life within the context of the Image and Likeness of God.
I was quite naive though.
And progressively I found more and more people that would be quite aggressive towards my approach. They did not like the idea of ‘embracing life’ and finding out ‘what’ and ‘how’ happiness truly works. What is the worst that can happen? You are here embracing life. Obviously the worst that could happen is that you could lose everything, everything taken away.
Which is what happened.
So in this endeavour, first points after I studied law was going to the police and even there, the pastoral officers would take me into their offices and discuss, trying to prove to me that Demons and Satan and the Devil exist and they would use the Bible to show that ‘it is written there, therefore it must exist’.
I disagree.
Because obviously the Bible was not written by God, anyone can see that.
And obviously, God being perfect, the origin of all things – God would not create something evil. It must have a different answer.
But according to the Bible there was no different answer, the answer was that according to the Bible and to the people that studied the Bible, the answer was that God created evil as well. Not that it is impossible but, it was improbable because absolute perfection, greatness... hardly the road to evil.
So, by the time I finished with the police and went on to giving myself direction in life, finding a way in which we could change the world forever more to be what God intended. I was very much clearly convinced; in spite of what I saw in the police which was murders and violence and all kinds of things. I saw that more than just an outflow, more just an outflow from the social condition and the lack of resources, the lack of money that caused most of the conditions that I have witnessed in the police. People simply did many of the things out of desperation.
So that wasn’t in their nature, it was just the nature of their situation rather than their own nature. And if they would have had the opportunity and have seen that to have all the resources necessary, they will profoundly change.
The question was ‘Why don’t they have all the resources’, and I was never satisfied with any of the explanations given to me or explaining to me that they have to work and make a profit in business and all kinds of things. Because none of the things really made sense. Having grown up in a business, having worked in it and then later on starting my own businesses, it was very clear that the profit motive was nothing else but making a decision about how much money you want to make, adding it onto the product and then presenting it to the buyer and they either buy it or they don’t. And then you present it to the buyer in such a way that they have no option but to buy it. Or they have no option but to question – they’d have to accept the price.
And then in that way you make money.
We really experimented with that in pricing goods from the very low to the very high. And strange enough, the higher the price, the more valuable it is seen to be accepted by the purchaser and we experimented with extremes situations. Which we became clear, if one, it’s like a predisposition that the human has. They like to pay a lot for things they feel is valuable and therefore all you have to do is to make sure that what happens is that they end up feeling that what they’re buying is valuable. If that feeling exists, they will pay the price because they are satisfying their feeling of value. Fascinating! Highly Effective! Incredible!
Was it actually applied in our Capitalistic System? Unfortunately not.
Because that would have already made the world quite a different place because a lot more money would have moved, a lot less suffering would have occurred. But maybe on the other side with the odds turning against everyone and the world becoming one giant casino where there’s only a few punters making the big bucks while most end up losing everything, that’s maybe the only way we will a better world. We will see.
to be continued
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