From the time that we are young we are always in a state of need. A child is totally dependent on its mother for its nutrition, its care and its well-being. A child is incapable of taking care of itself. As the child grows it continues to be in a state of need and one of the responsibilities of parents is to somehow, as the child grows, teach the child to be independent, to be able to get along without the constant support of the parents.
We have school systems that we send our children to who, we would assume, train them in a way that they can release themselves from dependence on others to take care of them. Well, in this teaching process, one of the great difficulties that isn’t quite understood because everything is taught in the public schools within the context of the world. One of the problems is: how do you teach children what goes on outside of the context of the world? How are you able to teach them to be able to carry on without a relationship with the world? And what does the world in fact do, to these young people? It creates peer pressure; it creates the pressure of what’s going on now and what’s happening now and the degree of your involvement in that.
In school, and all of you who have gone to Junior High and High School in America you have most likely noted that within the school there is a social structure. There’s a society that has nothing to do with the much larger scope.
When you go into the world there’s a social structure and a society that you’re thrust into. Are you capable of handling it and are you capable of removing yourself from it? There’s nobody that is giving advice to people that says to them, “You don’t have to be part of all this you don’t have to be involved in all this, there’s another way”.
And unless that kind of advice comes, then you begin to believe that there is no other way. We have to continue on this worldly path that we have been thrown into, and we have to make our way through it, and our success in this world is what our success is in the worldly way.
So standards are begun to be set up, standards like wealth, and fame, notoriety, power, and in the worldly path these are the standards that make you stand out, that make you something special. All of these standards come with a very strong price on the person involved in trying to obtain them.
Show business: the constant need to be out front and famous leads to great anxiety. The cure to the anxiety is self-medication. How many people fall from the pedestal because of alcohol and drugs?
The need for money comes with the pressure of obtaining it, and with all of the fluctuations in all of the markets, and all of the fluctuations in every way that you can make money there comes a tremendous pressure. How do you handle the pressure? You handle the pressure through self-medication, and again, drugs and alcohol.
It’s pretty well known that in America, alcohol is the biggest drug and is used to self-medicate. Well, how do you bring to people the word that the penultimate of your existence and your time in this world is not related to how much money you made, or how famous you became, or how much power you had?
