For most people in western culture, their jobs are first priority. There are a number of reasons for this, but chief among them is the fact that there is insufficient satisfaction or sense of fulfillment in just being. The compulsive drive to do work is also reinforced by the realization that we live in a sinful world and are ourselves, sinners by nature and by choice. Everyone starts life with a deficit, a sense of inadequacy and insufficiency and inferiority. And we quickly begin to try to remedy the situation by doing. The debt must be paid and payments are usually life-long and success oriented. Moreover, the deficit is so huge and active that failure along the line in just one area augments the total burden. Imperfection in our performance reminds us of the maxim: “He who offends (the law) in one point is guilty of all”.

Since the debt is beyond remedy by doing admirable activities or achievements, one eventually experiences despair. Only one possibility remains, and that is atonement. We must pay for our debt by a life of suffering. Thus we condemn ourselves to a dual sentence. “Thou shalt suffer and thou shalt work hard”. At the deepest level we know what the real solution is, but will deny it to the death. Modern humans do not know how simply to be: the very idea is intolerable. Acceptable being can only be actualized through doing. And, in all, there is suffering.

At the levels of consciousness which overlie the depth of knowing which denies the real solution, the human mind collectively invents intensive, elaborate and clever rationales for the value of work and for the inescapability of suffering. Work is seen as good and suffering as bad. Pretending to lack the means to deal with suffering, the popular mind passively refers that matter to medical science, though without serious hope. Not much can be done about the suffering so we turn to concentrate on the working - about which we become extremely active, insistent and refined. Any hope that we can eliminate the suffering lies in working hard. If you are active and work hard enough then you might be healthy.

But why do we put ourselves to such an extreme trial and confusion in the first place? This question would require different answers for different people. But for all of us it is the effect of an unconscious self-destructive impulse. As such it is only one of many expressive conditions, events, or actions which spring from the same impulse present, apparently, in every spirit/person entering into this world. And what causes the self-destructive impulse? For most people in our culture, at least, the self-destructive impulse is an expression of a negative self-concept, a negative sense of worth for the self. This is a self-concept in which the self has been judged and found, not just in need of improvements here and there, but not fit to live. A sentence of death has been passed. Illnesses and hard work can be viewed as means of implementation of the death process, preenactment of the death process, “dry runs”, at it were. They are more than this, of course, but this can be seen as one of their facets.

The dynamics of self-hatred and the resultant commitment to suffering begins before birth. The conditions as experienced by the parents and others in the child’s immediate environment is communicated vibrationally to the prenatal child and to the newborn infant. The message is unmistakable and is indelibly impressed upon the child’s unconscious mind. Immediately instructions are issued which result in susceptibility to one or more of the “approved” devices of self-punishment. To every child born into any contemporary culture within at least western civilization, the message from the culture goes like this:

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