wish fulfillment

181:0.1Af­ter the con­clu­sion of the farewell dis­course to the eleven, Je­sus vis­ited in­for­mally with them and re­counted many ex­pe­ri­ences which con­cerned them as a group and as in­di­vid­u­als. At last it was be­gin­ning to dawn upon these Galileans that their friend and teacher was go­ing to leave them, and their hope grasped at the prom­ise that, af­ter a lit­tle while, he would again be with them, but they were prone to for­get that this re­turn visit was also for a lit­tle while. Many of the apos­tles and the lead­ing dis­ci­ples re­ally thought that this prom­ise to re­turn for a short sea­son (the short in­ter­val be­tween the res­ur­rec­tion and the as­cen­sion) in­di­cated that Je­sus was just go­ing away for a brief visit with his Fa­ther, af­ter which he would re­turn to es­tab­lish the king­dom. And such an in­ter­pre­ta­tion of his teach­ing con­formed both with their pre­con­ceived be­liefs and with their ar­dent hopes. Since their life­long be­liefs and hopes of wish ful­fill­ment were thus agreed, it was not dif­fi­cult for them to find an in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the Mas­ter’s words which would jus­tify their in­tense long­ings.

100:3.2To the re­li­gion­ist the word God be­comes a sym­bol sig­ni­fy­ing the ap­proach to su­preme re­al­ity and the rec­og­ni­tion of di­vine value. Hu­man likes and dis­likes do not de­ter­mine good and evil; moral val­ues do not grow out of wish ful­fill­ment or emo­tional frus­tra­tion.

160:1.7Suc­cess­ful liv­ing is noth­ing more or less than the art of the mas­tery of de­pend­able tech­niques for solv­ing com­mon prob­lems. The first step in the so­lu­tion of any prob­lem is to lo­cate the dif­fi­culty, to iso­late the prob­lem, and frankly to rec­og­nize its na­ture and grav­ity. The great mis­take is that, when life prob­lems ex­cite our pro­found fears, we refuse to rec­og­nize them. Like­wise, when the ac­knowl­edg­ment of our dif­fi­cul­ties en­tails the re­duc­tion of our long-cher­ished con­ceit, the ad­mis­sion of envy, or the aban­don­ment of deep-seated prej­u­dices, the av­er­age per­son prefers to cling to the old il­lu­sions of safety and to the long-cher­ished false feel­ings of se­cu­rity. Only a brave per­son is will­ing hon­estly to ad­mit, and fear­lessly to face, what a sin­cere and log­i­cal mind dis­cov­ers.

160:4.13But life will be­come a bur­den of ex­is­tence un­less you learn how to fail grace­fully. There is an art in de­feat which no­ble souls al­ways ac­quire; you must know how to lose cheer­fully; you must be fear­less of dis­ap­point­ment. Never hes­i­tate to ad­mit fail­ure. Make no at­tempt to hide fail­ure un­der de­cep­tive smiles and beam­ing op­ti­mism. It sounds well al­ways to claim suc­cess, but the end re­sults are ap­palling. Such a tech­nique leads di­rectly to the cre­ation of a world of un­re­al­ity and to the in­ev­i­ta­ble crash of ul­ti­mate dis­il­lu­sion­ment.

160:4.14Suc­cess may gen­er­ate cour­age and pro­mote con­fi­dence, but wis­dom comes only from the ex­pe­ri­ences of ad­just­ment to the re­sults of one’s fail­ures. Men who pre­fer op­ti­mistic il­lu­sions to re­al­ity can never be­come wise. Only those who face facts and ad­just them to ide­als can achieve wis­dom. Wis­dom em­braces both the fact and the ideal and there­fore saves its devo­tees from both of those bar­ren ex­tremes of phi­los­o­phy—the man whose ide­al­ism ex­cludes facts and the ma­te­ri­al­ist who is de­void of spir­i­tual out­look. Those timid souls who can only keep up the strug­gle of life by the aid of con­tin­u­ous false il­lu­sions of suc­cess are doomed to suf­fer fail­ure and ex­pe­ri­ence de­feat as they ul­ti­mately awaken from the dream world of their own imag­i­na­tions.