Other times I am motivated to do good things so that other people will think well of me. But I hate that too. I resist that. I strive to catch myself in this thought process as well. I don’t want to do good things for those reasons. Yet, I am also aware that it is natural to desire to be accepted, approved, and admired by our family and community.
We all are motivated by something. We choose what we will be motivated by. We also spend time motivating other people. We choose how we will motivate them. These days, this is referred to as being an influencer.
Some influencers use guilt and shame to motivate others to give up Indulgent Pleasures or to do the right thing. When people successfully motivate me like this, I do it out of guilt and shame. When they are not successful with this method, I rebel and sometimes want to do the exact opposite of what they advocate – partake of the Indulgent Pleasures and refuse to do what they say.
Sacrifice is giving up certain relationships with people and things for other relationships with people and things.
I usually choose to sacrifice things that make me feel good in the moment (Indulgent Pleasures) for things that make me feel good in the long-term (Sustainable Joy). I am motivated to do good and to serve my family and community even though it may create some measure of stress or discomfort for me. My goal is to develop good long-term compatible relationships with them, which return Sustainable Joy.
Asceticism is a word I have used to describe the process of sacrificing too much and for the wrong reasons – guilt, shame, pride, envy. Asceticism is severe self-discipline and avoidance of all forms of indulgence, typically for religious reasons. What makes this type of sacrifice undesirable is the severity of it. If we look at the definition of Asceticism, we see the word severe, which characterizes it as over-the-top self-discipline and avoidance of all forms of indulgence. I don’t think any of us would believe that self-disciple and avoidance of indulgence is over-the-top in general. It's the extreme nature of the sacrifice and our motives for doing it that determine whether our sacrifice is Ascetic or Real.
Indulgence is the other side of the extreme. It is not sacrificing enough, which ends in undesirable consequences. Indulgence is when we allow ourselves to enjoy too much of a pleasure (Indulgent Pleasure), which ends in undesirable consequences, not in the consequences we actually desired to obtain.
There have been times when I reject an influencer who is advocating good things because I sense or just think that they are trying to motivate me with guilt, shame, pride, or envy. I’m hypersensitive to this kind of influence and so will reject what they are advocating even if it might actually be good for me.
And sometimes the influencer is not using guilt, shame, pride, or envy but I have been treated that way by so many other influencers surrounding this topic that I attribute this motive to the influencer.
So when I attribute this characteristic to the influencer I think they are being motivated by selfishness. I believe they are bossy, narrow-minded, or ascetic. And I believe this justifies my rejection of what they are advocating and also justifies my refusal to sacrifice in the way they are proposing.
To resolve this problem, I have been learning to separate the way influencers present their ideas and the actual ideas they are presenting. Evaluating their ideas separately has required me to differentiate between Joy in the journey (Sustainable Joy) and Indulgent Pleasure.
Influencers advocate that I make a choice. For every choice I make, I give up another choice I could make. What they advocate for me to choose and give up is their idea. But I have to figure out if what they are proposing is actually my Sustainable Joy or if is my Indulgent Pleasure. What characterizes Asceticism (the way I’m defining it) is me giving up not only Indulgent Pleasures, but also my Sustainable Joy.
So how can I know the difference between Indulgent Pleasures and Sustainable Joy? For me, the line has been blurry. How can I know what I need to avoid and what I need to hold on to? The only way to answer these questions is to identify where I want to end up – my desired long-term results. Will giving this thing or this relationship or this way of doing things up increase my joy over time? And will it be sustainable? And just a side note here: I have learned that evaluating these decisions based on the measure of my own sustainable joy covers the sustainable joy of my family and community.
There are two ways I have used to differentiate between Sustainable Joy and Indulgent Pleasure:
The first is by asking myself what my consequences have been. Has my ability to experience Sustainable Joy increased, stayed the same, or decreased over time? Over time, are my joy sensors becoming more numb, increasing in sensitivity, or becoming scattered?
The second way that I use to differentiate between Sustainable Joy and Indulgent Pleasure is to pay attention to the Holy Ghost. And in some ways, this is the same as the first way because the presence of the Holy Ghost brings Sustainable Joy. But there are some things that I partake of and do that are in conflict with the Joy of the Holy Ghost by degrees, meaning some things greatly decrease the presence and some things decrease it just a little. As I’ve gotten older, I have learned to identify many of these things, but I’m still learning.
For example, I still sometimes entertain self-serving thoughts that feel good in the moment but aren’t going to end me where I want to go if I continue to incorporate them into my mind and heart. So the Holy Ghost is there to train me and won't let me indulge in the Peace experience. I am required to sacrifice and sacrifice more intensely over time as I gain higher levels of ability.
I have learned that sacrifice returns Energy.
The presence of the Holy Ghost returns Peace.
Combined and balanced, they equal Joy.
With this information and the continuous training of the Holy Ghost, I can differentiate between Indulgent Pleasure and Sustainable Joy before Indulgence ends me in a trap that is very difficult to get out of.
There have been times in my life when I haven’t listened to the Holy Ghost. I’ve actually gone against it, thinking it was just a psychological problem that I had that was preventing me from getting involved with a certain person or way of doing things. How did that turn out? I became somewhat numbed to Joy. And that ended with the Asceticism in me increasing over time. When I had enough of that and living without real Joy, I turned back more completely and sincerely to God and pleaded for help. “Help me to be happy. Please.”
So during the years when the Asceticism in me was more predominant, why was the influencer in me motivated to motivate my children to be good? I wasn’t differentiating between Indulgent Pleasure and Sustainable Joy. I wasn’t feeling attraction. I wasn’t feeling real love. So I was just trying to be good because good is good. Bad is bad. I had to be good and my children had to be good. That is what was accepted, praised, and admired in my society. So I unconsciously made that my goal. For us all to be loved, we had to edit ourselves to be good. And that may be an okay motivation. But I learned that it wasn't enough for me.
My motivation changed almost overnight and at the same time has continued changing over many years. The change started when I experienced true attraction. For me that came when I started studying the life of Jesus Christ and was trying to figure out what the atonement was and what this all had to do with me right now. There came a day, when I saw him and understood him in a way that I had never before seen or understood. I got a glimpse of who he was and what he was doing for us. Not just what he did, but what he is doing now. And that gimpse helped me understand myself better. It helped me understand what Joy was, where it came from, and how it is an inherent need. It totally changed my goals, my aspirations, my desires. I started a journey away from Asceticism (and it has been a journey rather than a one-time choice) and towards being motivated by Attraction.
The Attraction was towards Jesus Christ. I was the last one to believe that the foundational solution to my problems was that I needed to see someone I totally admired and fully experience that admiration. I didn’t even know I had the capacity to admire like that. I was so focused on being admired. But when I saw him – understood him…how can I even explain it? A song comes to mind. It’s called Waterloo by Abba.
At Waterloo Napoleon did surrender
Oh yeah
And I have met my destiny in quite a similar way
The history book on the shelf
Is always repeating itself
Waterloo, I was defeated, you won the war
Waterloo, promise to love you forever more
Waterloo, couldn’t escape if I wanted to
Waterloo, knowing my fate is to be with you
Waterloo, finally facing my Waterloo
I tried to hold you back, but you were stronger
Oh yeah
And now it seems my only chance is giving up the fight
And how could I ever refuse
I feel like I win when I loose
So before my ‘Waterloo’ my main focus was on desiring to be admired --desiring to be loved. My motivation to sacrifice, give up Indulgent Pleasures, and do good was based on receiving love from my family and community, which created many problems for me in my goal to develop compatible relationships with them. Anger, hurt feelings, frustration, irritation, stubbornness, blame, shame, selfishness, envy, pride, Asceticism and Indulgent Pleasure, etc. And I’m not saying I’m completely over all this. I know this is the natural man. It’s a part of our humanity. It’s a lifelong quest to be subject to it and to strive against it. But after I met Jesus Christ and saw what kind of person he was and experienced what it was like to be loved by him, it was all over. I experienced Sustainable Joy. Sustainable Attraction. Charity. Love. Eternal Pleasure. All of it. And that became my motive. Whether there's a higher way to love, I'm not sure. But I am motivated to sacrifice because first of all, I can't stand life when I separate myself from him, and secondly, when I see him in other people, I LOVE IT! I admire them and the Joy that I feel when I see their beauty and the empathy I experience when I understand them, is better than anything I've ever felt. I personally want to be loved like that, but that's not why I love like that. I love like that because that's what I love. That's the bottom line.
I thought I knew Jesus Christ before my Waterloo days, which started in around 2006. I had grown up a Christian. I had seen millions of paintings of him and had been reading the scripture about him and his influencers for years. But, that wasn’t enough for me. I had to come closer and see his personality, his character traits, and especially see what this God had to do with me personally. I mean, it’s all well and good to be totally amazing (You’re Welcome!). A person like that can exist and I would look and say, “That’s so good for you to be totally amazing. Congratulations.” But this was the difference between someone like that and him: He was interested in me, in what I thought, and in what I wanted. He wasn't all self-focussed. He was that amazing, knew it, but chose (and still chooses) to use it to serve others. His eyes are not on himself. They are on us - the individual he is interacting with. And to be aware of him looking at me, evaluating me...there is nothing better.
Does that makes sense? Am I explaining it well enough to describe how I have seen him?
Now, as I look back at myself – who I was back then – I am able to evaluate him a little more clearly. He was so empathetic with me but at the same time he would hold the line. He was willing to take my side but then asked for me to look at his. He was willing to help me obtain my goals even if my goals weren’t exactly the best. I became more interested to know what his goals were and to see where I could help him. He got behind me and helped me obtain my goals, so I eventually got behind him to help him obtain his.
Here's the point -- I think: The Sustainable Joy that I experience has taken the place of my Indulgent Pleasures, meaning it is stronger than any Indulgent Pleasure I have ever experienced. But he doesn't allow me to be indulgent with him. I know he is training me and I have to keep the rules. Yet what I feel when I'm with him is the most pleasure I could ever want or need. I'm still working on learning the rules, keeping them, growing in my abilities to be subject to higher level rules, so it's not like I can stay in that place 24/7. But this is the thing: His love, the mere association with him, makes all Indulgent Pleasures completely nothing at all. They are just nothing at all compared to Him.
So He is my reason for sacrificing, for being good, for serving. Why should I? Because he loves like this and he loves me like this.
This was a long post and a little meandering. If you hung in there, I hope it helps you know that there is an eternally deep well in Jesus Christ for all of us to tap into. I just don't think a lot of people understand just how deep and satisfying it is.
