The Greatest Secret On Earth

” What is the cause and cure of a man’s or a woman’s problem on earth ? “

That is the foremost question ever formed in the human mind. Discovering the cause and attempting to apply  the cure is the purpose of this 3 post blog series with the answer being revealed in the final post.

Mankind can be likened to a large party of tourists searching for a new home site. They board a train that can take them from a dry and dreary desert to a grand and lofty mountaintop. The travel guide assures them that the higher they go, the greater their capacity to see and enjoy the countryside.

There are station stops all along the upward way. A tourist may get off and end his trip at any point he likes. He is perfectly free to cut himself short, or to continue all the way to the top.

Some get off at the first stop. They find themselves in desolate country. They settle down in secret despair.

Others go on for another station or two, then take their leave of the train. Their location is somewhat better, but, still, they settle down with vague uneasiness.

A few others, the enduring ones, keep going. Some-where along the early part of the journey, they made a fascinating discovery : Though the trip certainly has its challenges, the farther they go the easier it becomes. Patience and persistence present sure rewards. So they eagerly press on. As they do so, they reach the peaks of happy and unworried living. With enormous relief, they find that the mountaintop was not just something announced in the travel guide; it is real, it is there, it is theirs.

The Needless Desperation of Man

Edward Arlington Robinson sums up the desperate predicament of man in his classic poem, Richard Cory.

Everyone in town admired Richard Cory’s princely manners. They envied his apparently exalted station in life. He seemed the very ideal of the successful individual. But it was all a stage performance. No one knew it better than Richard Cory. In his despair, he finally fled the stage in the only way he knew, in self-destruction.

Genuinely happy people are much rarer than one supposes. People wear a variety of masks:

smiling masks, wise-appearing ones, excited ones, masks of wordly success, all in frantic attempt to convince themselves and others that the act is real. But, sooner or later, the play must come to it’s end, leaving the actor alone and afraid on his little stage.

What does every man/woman want? He only sense what he wants. He wants to be free. From what? From his heartache and suffering, from his compulsive desires, from his fear of what other people can do to him/her. from secret shames and guilts carried over from past folly.

Everyone wants self-liberty and health. But doesn’t know what it is, or where to find it. Still, we anxiously seek, and almost always in the wrong places. In despair over finding the right needle in the haystack, we don’t even see we are searching in the wrong haystack.

We hopefully comfort ourselves, “Well, tomorrow will be different.” But it won’t. And we know it. We know we will go back and find ourselves in the same old despair. The only change will be in a few exterior surroundings, But it’s the same old haunted house.

This concludes part 1 of this three part series.







Monalisa