Day Forty One - Crests and Troughs of Belief

I posted a blog entry entitled "Hope" a while back. In it I talked about how I have been purchasing lottery tickets (specifically Powerball tickets) as an exercise in hope. The idea was that I was not so much interested in winning the lottery (although I certainly would not mind that outcome) but rather I derived some comfort in the knowledge that the lottery ticket sat in my wallet. The ownership of the ticket was the ownership of hope. This is actually true. Having the ticket in my wallet does for some reason act as an anxiety release valve and presumably that is because hope existed where it did not exist previously. However, checking the numbers the day after the drawing does produce mildly negative emotions in the form of feeling let down. The question is, does the positive emotion of owning hope outweigh the negative emotion of being let down? The answer is, I'm not sure. So, I have found myself in a belief trough in terms of this lottery ticket / hope experience. This however, is enlightening in itself in that by participating in one exercise I have opened my eyes to a larger pattern. So where does that now leave me? I have no illusions that insights such as these carry me one inch closer to my goal (or even knowing exactly what that goal is). It is E-Value rather than HP-Value. (E-Value being "that which makes the passage of existence more pleasurable" i.e., Entertainment and HP-Value being "that which serves a higher purpose than E-Value" i.e., Higher Purpose Value). These are terms I have carried with me for some time and perhaps will be further elaborated on in another post. So in conclusion, I suppose the lesson learned is that one should not confuse E-Value for HP-Value as I did by rationalizing my purchase of a lottery ticket as serving some lofty philosphical purpose when in actuality I really just wanted to win the money. Then again, perhaps there is no moral to this story and in the words of Homer Simpson "it's just a bunch of stuff that happened" (in my head mostly). But then again, perhaps I a merely in a belief trough and will think differently about this when the wave crests again.