Do we live for our substitute gratification or do we really make the things that we want?

Do we surrender our life:

To love?
To our mission?
Or to our passions?
Do we give our child rather more surrogates to calm them down?
Are we loving parents…?

What are our substitute gratifications?
TV, Facebook, industrially processed food, Junk food, drugs, all the distraction… mainly everything that we don’t need and don’t give us the reason to live.

When I was 25 years old, I read the book: The Continuum-Concept, In Search of Lost Happiness, by Jean Liedloff…

In this book, Jean describes the suffering of the sciences who trekked through the Amazons area and their porters, simple American Indians who enjoyed the journey…

Why was it so?
The American Indians had no trekking gear, and they carried the heavy baggage of the Sciences… so they should suffer much harder…?

The reason is:
The American Indians grew up with so much love … and so pain, hardship is for them easy to endure.

We are growing up with less or no love, but with substitute gratification.
And the surrogates make us weak…!

I could watch a similar situation when I lived 25 years ago in an Indian Ashram.
The Indians could bear very much pain, hardships and could still enjoy their life…

The Indians were beating their kids. And still, they were giving their kids so much love and forgiveness that the pain was for the Indians not important. They didn’t rather care for the pain.

When you can choose between good and pleasant/enjoyable, choose the good the pleasant is mostly evil. – Vedanta

Why is it so?
For instance, an unhealthy lifestyle is pleasant, but in the long term, you get punished for that…

So more substitute gratification, so more we get lost in our life…

A quote from the movie “Rocky”

But it ain’t how hard you hit; it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done.

Through the substitute gratification, we are getting so weak that we can’t surrender anymore our life to the things that matter to us.

And when we get ill by the surrogates, we are taking drugs or medicine that makes us even weaker…

My Video: How to waste our life? https://youtu.be/jX9PSsikgas
My Audio on Podcast: RELAX WITH MEDITATION or see link in the end.
My Audio: https://rudizimmerer.s3-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com/6/How+to+waste+our+life.mp3