Reflections on Jesianity: Is greed a virtue or a sin? Joy versus pleasure.

Approximately November 2023. Slight updates June 2024.

Warning: Everything but what moves you to discipleship of Jesus is destructive of your health. jesianity.info/search/label/Jesus

The great and indispensable psychologist, Abraham maslow, was the first or among the first to observe intrinsic versus extrinsic gratification. Intrinsic based on what is going on inside the person, extrinsic, based on circumstances, conditions, Etc.

Except for a person in a vegetative state literally, medically, it is impossible for the human being to escape what honestly would be called greed for gratification.

The ability to choose what gratification we wish to  pursue, that we are born with, and can be brought back to life, is which gratifications to be greedy for. Extrinsic, stuff related, pleasure, happiness, comfort, safety, , popularity...

... Or joy, also called flow, optimal gratification, from what's going on inside based on what we are attempting, not what we are achieving, what we are attempting, serving against maximum challenge and effort, from the soul, in solidarity, for the joy of it.

Jesus is the Lord and Master by way of supreme emotional intelligence, of the Kingdom of Heaven within us, intrinsic gratification which only comes every breath, by serving the neediest from the soul in solidarity. Our Humanity in charge.

Our choices literally are:

To be slave to achieving external rewards. For the pleasure, the very very very intermittent and quickly subsiding pleasure of it.

To be servant, perpetually joyful, every breath that we are attempting to better the world around us. Infinite residents in the Kingdom of heaven. And it feels infinite. The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.

Jesus way that he exemplified and taught was to seek 100% of gratification internally, intrinsically, letting the nervous system, the soul, the mammalian brain, our humanity, issue Rewards when it thinks that the behavior is trying to help the larger whole and to not get teased and tempted and trapped by the extrinsic rewards that are all that the head / Spirits know and crave.

.. and it seems to James, the one writing here, that this describes the life of the man jesus, and exactly what he called all of us to do. For the joyful abundant life of it.

... more crucial than ever in this planetary Hell World we've destructed.