This is http://www.essayz.com/a9106123.htm Previous-Essay <== This-Essay ==> Following-Essay Click HERE on this line to find essays via Your-Key-Words. {Most frequent wordstarts of each essay will be put here.} ========================================================== %PERCEIVE HEAR SEE EVIL GOOD FEAR SALVATION REDEEM 910612 Our collusions, addictions and co-dependencies may twist our perceptions of good and evil until we perceive and fear relationships/people who might play key roles in our salvation, seeing them as evil relationships/people. On the other hand, we may perceive and associate ourselves with relationships/people who are key in our imprisonment as victims, as good relationships/people. We become confused about the essence of good and evil; perceiving alienation as good, and perceiving reconciliation as evil. Many people perceive their alienation from criminals, prostitutes, homosexuals, unemployed people and competing minorities as essential to being good themselves. Such "good" people must logically perceive any possible reconciliation between themselves and criminals, prostitutes, homosexuals and unemployed people as being evil. Such perceptions are confused perceptions; for the essence of evil is alienation, and the essence of good is reconciliation. To discover and understand our most subtle forms of dishonesty which perverts our perceptions, hearing and seeing; we will probably need to become reconciled with criminals, prostitutes, homosexuals, unemployed people and others who we may regard as evil people. We may need to become intimately involved in relationships which in our current twisted perceptions we may perceive as evil relationships; i.e., become involved in relationships of reconciliation and mutual understanding. If because of our dishonesties we now fear intimate relationships within which our dishonesties might be revealed, then our salvation will require us to become involved in intimate relationships which in our twisted way of perceiving we now see as evil relationships. Reconciliation entails dialogue with people who might reveal our dishonesties to us; seducing us into transcending our collusive games of mutual self deception, our addictions and our co- dependencies. Salvation for most people entails them transcending their current conception of what is good and what is evil; and so it entails transcending current conceptions of what relationships/people are to be regarded as good and/or as evil. Salvation is not a technical procedure. Salvation is not a technical solution to a technical problem. Salvation is the resolution of a dilemma, the dilemma of living healthy lives in an "imperfect" world full of "imperfect" people and relationships. (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy) ==========================================================