According to the stories of many cultures, the human beginning was a time of ease and wonder, free from hard labor, struggle, strife, and the alienation and fragmentation we know today. Sometimes this perfection is projected into the future—a New Jerusalem descending upon the earth, the city of God, or a heaven we enter after death. Sometimes it is viewed as the possible result of human effort, a tradition spanning from Plato’s Republic (ca. 360 B.C.E.; Hamilton and Cairns, 1969) and Thomas Moore’s Utopia (1516), to James Hilton’s Shangri-La, (1933) and B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948), among many others.
Whether the ground beneath our feet is heaven or hell depends entirely on our way of seeing and walking.
–Thich Nhat Hanh (2001)
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Notes
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Subsequent research by these two revealed that these same stages are found in all kinds of change in human behavior they have investigated and not just addiction.
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Bien, T. (2009). Paradise Lost: Mindfulness and Addictive Behavior. In: Didonna, F. (eds) Clinical Handbook of Mindfulness. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09593-6_16
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