To be or not to be.

A panacea for all ills. Is a good description of religious belief.
Are the more ground based solutions just too difficult. Do the twists and turns of the human mind with its sense of individual survival, which by definition substantially excludes others, expressly exclude what we feel right.
Without suppressive drugs, be they of the chemical kind or the artificial thrill of sustained spending, can mankind find happiness
Happiness a difficult concept. One man's happiness is another man's sorrow and yet we proclaim it universal, something recognisable to all, something definable and therefore attainable, just follow the instructions.
Those bloody instructions written, as are all instructions,by person who, from 'their perspective' have a clear idea of where they have been and wish to pass on to us the directions.
Any journey must have an 'objective' even if the objective is only to have tried ! But what if the objective is not where you want to be. What if all the self help books are moving us all in the wrong direction, a direction of self gratification, of self indulgence, what if we were to go in a different direction and try simply to empty ourselves of this obsession with self, empty ourselves of our overwhelming engagement with possessions as a means to an end. 
I was driving down the motorway into London this morning, the traffic at a standstill, I gazed across the landscape made bleak by Winter, a landscape which expressed nature in the raw, a scene repeated each year at this time. And as I looked out from my warm comfortable car, from my artificial environment onto fields and hedgerows each a habitat for some creature trying to survive the cold, I thought maybe this year maybe who knows when, I won't be passing and reflecting on this scene, I will be gone but the scene will remain much as it is. My materiality,my self absorption will count for nothing.

If the world is made up of things that can not be identified until seen,at which point they become something else (quantum theory) doesn't the unfathomable make a mockery of our unending questioning of our lives and the practices therein.