If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important - if you want to operate on your default setting - then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: the only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.(you can read the whole thing here, and buy it here.)
Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things - if they are where you tap real meaning in life - then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already - it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
(DFW, 2005)
AND BODY | ||
| Soul. | O, WHO shall from this dungeon raise A soul enslaved so many ways ? With bolts of bones, that fettered stands In feet, and manacled in hands ; Here blinded with an eye, and there Deaf with the drumming of an ear ; A soul hung up, as 'twere, in chains Of nerves, and arteries, and veins ; Tortured, besides each other part, In a vain head, and double heart ? | |
Body. | O, who shall me deliver whole, From bonds of this tyrannic soul ? Which, stretched upright, impales me so That mine own precipice I go ; And warms and moves this needless frame, (A fever could but do the same), And, wanting where its spite to try, Has made me live to let me die A body that could never rest, Since this ill spirit it possessed. | |
Soul. | What magic could me thus confine Within another's grief to pine ? Where, whatsoever it complain, I feel, that cannot feel, the pain ; And all my care itself employs, That to preserve which me destroys ; Constrained not only to endure Diseases, but, what's worse, the cure ; And, ready oft the port to gain, Am shipwrecked into health again. | |
Body. | But Physic yet could never reach The maladies thou me dost teach ; Whom first the cramp of hope does tear, And then the palsy shakes of fear ; The pestilence of love does heat, Or hatred's hidden ulcer eat ; Joy's cheerful madness does perplex, Or sorrow's other madness vex ; Which knowledge forces me to know, And memory will not forego ; What but a soul could have the wit To build me up for sin so fit ? So architects do square and hew Green trees that in the forest grew. | |
This morning at 5:20, Little Red begins to stir. Next thing we know, the light in his room clicks on. waaaaaiiiitaminute. Matters become more clear when we hear the Big Brother reading a book to him. By the time I get up to check on things, the Big Brother has gone out to the den, turned on all the lights, and gone back to his room to play with trains.
Time will say nothing but I told you so,
I've started cooking again. There are various reasons, most of which I'm not going to go into right now, but I'm happy to say that I still find great joy in it.
I love the bit about lying being punished, but not as often as telling the truth.5. Lying will be punished. Perhaps. But not as often as truth-telling. Lying effectively in many situations is generally superior than telling the truth, because often we have to search our minds for the truth, whereas a good lie can be easier to produce (though of course caution is indicated if the lie can be easily unmasked). Invariably a skillful liar makes a calculation about his chances of being exposed and avoids situations where a lie can be revealed. Lying is punished only if it is detected. A more reasonable assessment would be that ineffective and unskillful lying is severely punished. No one is held in greater contempt than an unskilled liar.
6. Lying is avoidable. Mark Twain, in his essay “On the Decay of the Art of Lying,” realized the importance of skillful lying, “No high-minded man, no man of right feeling, can contemplate the lumbering and slovenly lying of the present day without grieving to see a noble art so prostituted.” Twain goes on to make an event stronger point: that lying is unavoidable. “No fact is more firmly established than that lying is a necessity of our circumstances — the deduction that it is then a Virtue goes without saying. No virtue can reach its highest usefulness without careful and diligent cultivation – therefore, it goes without saying that this one ought to be taught in the public schools — even in the newspapers” [17].
I'll tell you what makes me most angry--it's that I can't seem to get to the place where I feel like I'm a whole person.
Tell me what it would mean to be a whole person.
I don't know--I guess I want to be free from constantly being pulled between contradictory desires.
Do you know anyone who is free from those? I'll bet there aren't any. In fact, I don't know of a single person who is "whole" in the way you describe.
. . .
And him beside rides fierce reuenging VVrath,
Vpon a Lion, loth for to be led;
And in his hand a burning brond he hath,
The which he brandisheth about his hed;
His eyes did hurle forth sparkles fiery red,
And stared sterne on all, that him beheld,
As ashes pale of hew and seeming ded;
And on his dagger still his hand he held,
Trembling through hasty rage, whe[n] choler in him sweld.His ruffin raiment all was staind with blood,
Which he had spilt, and all to rags yrent,
Through vnaduized rashnesse woxen wood;
For of his hands he had no gouernement,
Ne car'd for bloud in his auengement:
But when the furious fit was ouerpast,
His cruell facts he often would repent;
Yet wilfull man he neuer would forecast,
How many mischieues should ensue his heedlesse hast.
The last two weeks have been a bit unfortunate, with the Black Dog prowling and growling in the bushes outside the reach of the campfire light; I just lost enthusiasm for my enthusiasms. I think it’s lifted. The worst thing about Depression isn’t the sense that you’re ac-centuating the negative, it’s that you’re seeing things the way they really are, stripped of the illusions you use every day to divert yourself from the Yawning Maw of Futility. It’s the wind that blows off the snow and reveals the stone.
