Maybe I've never shared this, among the most important gifts I've ever received. About 15 years ago I......

Maybe I've never shared this, among the most important gifts I've ever received. About 15 years ago I embarqed toward the journey that has captured me ever since. Leaving the ways of our culture, 180 degrees in the opposite direction, from working to make rich people richer, like me, to lived solidarity from the soul serving our neediest sisters and brothers. It was Joyful from the start. There was never, has never been, the tiniest portion of a instant when I've been other than overjoyed with this total change of direction. It is pretty much muscle memory for me now, but not so at the beginning. It could not have been. It was natural for me, I think it is the natural path we were all born to. But our sick culture strips us away from that path, thinking it virtue to do so to its children, and puts us on exactly the opposite, exactly the wrong path. And we gain muscle memory for that and our nervous system literally and actually atrophies for the correct path. So it takes tremendous work and experience for that to be recreated. Really in my departure on this path I found it useful to imagine that there is a creator of us all, a parent figure that unconditionally loves us all. For me then and now God is love, life, and Truth. Period.  People like Teresa and Gandhi said the same, and most if not all of those who throughout history I Revere lived the same. That was an understanding in my head but it was also something more and more clearly felt in my spirit. It became tangible for me in that way. I had a wonderful warm feeling, tremendous peace, each moment that I experienced myself as in creators will. And then I received the gift. From my earliest memories I was obsessed with the female form and all things sexual toward that form. For most of my decades, carefully taught by my culture in a trillion ways, I thought that virtue. I was carefully addicted to all of the lists that our society worships but I'll speak of this one for the moment. The gift I received was in the form of a question that came to my mind, as I was following my inclination to admire a shapely female form, the question came to me, is that that you are now starting to direct your attention toward, is that toward or away from God? The answer was instantaneous for me, instantly and comfortably clear, away from. Yes, I can hear the chorus arguing otherwise. I'm speaking what I experienced then, and with every breath since. The answer for me was instantaneous, that's away from being a vessel for love, life, and Truth. It is turning away from love, toward lust, toward my selfish inclinations, away from serving the neediest from the soul in solidarity. It was then instantly clear to me that turning away from the pure Spirit of love, life, and Truth, was not the choice I wanted to make then. And it has never been the choice since then that I have wanted to make, in any instant. Experientially for me it is not about right and wrong. It is not about guilt or not being guilty. It certainly has nothing to do with an afterlife in which I have zero belief. For me it is simply a matter of now having a mechanism that enables me to pursue Joy rather than pleasure, Joy being infinitely more gratifying in any and every moment then pleasure. I don't know that this could make sense to anyone beside me. Or maybe everyone beside me learned it much earlier and knows that much better. I don't know that it can be helpful to anyone beside me. But it has saved me from wasting even moments on Pleasure when there was an infinite Divine banquet of Joy there before me,   and before all of us I believe, with every breath we take. But it is all but completely obscured behind the Avalanche, the ocean, the universe, love sick country messages inundating us from our pathological, suicidal, malignant culture telling us exactly the opposite. So without mechanisms such as I just mentioned it is almost impossible to choose the joyful path from moment to moment.. James