Things happen because of love.
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Fear is the passive mood of love. If you love something, work to make it better. If you only fear to lose what you love, it’s already lost.
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Faith precedes knowledge.
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From the moment you’re born, you have all the energy you’ll ever need. Just add focus.
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Better to know you’re bad than believe you’re good.
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To move forward is to move through.
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If God is love, then love is the only real emotion and everything else is a version of the truth.
Existence is a supernatural fact.
It’s not that God’s existence can’t be proven; it’s that it can’t be proven to anyone else.
[From a response to something on Facebook...]
I don’t deny the existence of anything except paradoxes–everything exists because everything else exists. Things either exist or they don’t exist. There’s no gray area of semi-existence as far as I know. I accept that people have “worshiped” various “deities” throughout time, but that doesn’t necessarily mean worship or the concept of deities have anything more to do with God than brushing your teeth and the tooth fairy.
Yes, transient refers to life and death, but also to memory and forgetting. The problem with the mind is that it doesn’t hold everything we want it to. We forget things, important things, as often as we remember them. There is no “self” that is always in our mind. Just the various belongings of self that float in and out of our mind field.
Further, I’m talking about God in a proper not a pop-spirituality sense. Everyone’s heard of God so they think they get it. Well, everyone’s heard of rocket science but atheists are like people who can’t see the commonality between arithmetic and calculus. As a child in Sunday school you learn that God is a person who loves personally, lives in a place and makes plans for us. As an adult, I should hope that our idea of God matures a bit.
The God of Einstein and his theory of relativity coexisted with no difficulty in him. Why do we have so much trouble marrying the idea of infinity with rationality?
Simply put, even if a shaft of light did erupt from the heavens, sicknesses were cured, water walked on (all these things have happened–atom bombs and lightning, polio cured, boats and moon walks respectively) people would still find varying explanations. The only reason we turn away from reality and seek metaphor is because we have grown so bored with the awesomely inexplicable and inexhaustible shaft of sensory brilliance that is existence itself.
Things existing is a supernatural fact, there’s no scientific way to determine why they do or don’t. Nothing should lead to more nothing, not something-ness. But instead, darkness has given birth to sight, minerals have given birth to touch, void has given rise to existence. Miraculous.
If these aren’t obvious signs of a reality exceeding our present understanding, then I’m at a loss to understand what constitutes awe at all.
The lesser good cannot exist without its greater.
Really, the only bad part about not having a job is how sometimes it can make you feel a little less awesome than you actually are.
Mommy, why don’t we have a daddy to come home with us?
Second worst is the pity you get from people about your new untouchable status.
Jeez, how do you do it? How do you go on drawing breath not knowing where your next order is coming from? I hope you find a new boss soon before it’s too late.
They’d have you believe it’s because of the money. They’re concerned about you. Your family. What will happen if you get sick? How will you survive on non-organic food?
Is that stuff even palatable?
It’s not about money. Deep down, everybody knows it’s not about money. Everybody knows it’s really about status. How much you have and how much you can give or take. Money just being the short-hand for how we keep score.
Money, the invisible current that allows us to do or take things. Property, the invisible force field around stuff that means they’re yours and no one else’s.
I mean, if you really think about this stuff, you start to see it’s very juvenile. All of this taking and hoarding and stuffing ourselves is precisely the behavior of young children not even fully aware of the existence and subjectivity of others, much less themselves. We’re like kindergarteners running around trying to lick things so no one else will touch them.
Meanwhile, the clock keeps counting down to our own personal judgement day. A lot of us want to forget it and shove it to the back of our minds, but it’s always lurking, the knowledge that we’re powerless against the onslaught of time. Time gives us all things and takes it all back at once.
We do so many things to stave off the trembling, but there it is. You’re dying. Life is killing you. The wick is eating itself up in ecstasy, in pleasure, in agony… everything cascading into darkness.
We create stories called “meanings” and “purposes” to parse the angelic flame that is existence. We haven’t evolved much from gut-readers and bone-grinders. We change our clothes and think we’re reborn.
I don’t want pity from children.
Even if I live to 99, I will die a newborn. Humans are transients in the music of the spheres. Soft flesh, mostly water, easily discarded, quick to reform. What is there to mourn?
I’ve seen my brother lain on a metal slab, his face identical to a drunkard’s in death, and I’ve held my son, still wet with placenta… separated only by quivers and spasms.
When the music of these quivers and spasms becomes unbearable, we call it living and we start seeking our escape. And the entire movement of our escape is what we call the body of life and we adorn it with stories. Like a Christmas tree, we hang our hopes and disappointments on it, singing it hymns and dreaming of a bloody red savior beyond time.
The best short story I’ve ever read was written by Neil Gaiman. It’s called “In the End” and it goes a lot like the beginning.
Folded in time, bent like a telekinetic’s spoon, life is the interval between beginnings and endings.
Don’t pity a blue note when it sings.
It’s nice when you have hope, but you shouldn’t let the lack of it stand in your way. After all, hope is irrational. The realistic view is to admit you don’t know and move on.
Too much fuss is made about hope. It’s not necessary. All that’s required is the will to move forward, to continue, to keep dealing with things as they come. Hope is passive, another word for waiting, another mode of biding one’s time, procrastinating the inevitable present.
Now is all there ever is. There is no back-story. You weren’t born, you didn’t grow up, and no path brought you here. You woke up and there was now, that’s all, nothing else.
Your memories are the notebooks of an extinct being. Your old photographs are hieroglyphics of a bygone era. They are two-dimensional illusions. There is nothing to extract from them.
I mean, look critically. You live, what, 100-years if you’re extraordinarily fortunate? How old is the universe? How long will it continue? A billion more years? A billion billion?
How can your few, trivial years spent living in the midst of this aeonic drift tell you anything about it’s ultimate nature? You’re like a chimpanzee contemplating Motzart. Not even a chimpanzee. An amoeba.
And the future? Dare we even speak of the future? What gall to stare into its protean depth and imagine some comprehension. Countless probabilities cascading into an incalculable event horizon, quantum states blinking in and out of being with such speed, the mind cannot grasp their intervals.
Why seek to grasp the music of the spheres? Many sailors before you have run upon jagged rocks attempting to divine its source. It is always beyond us. Beyond everything. It continues, oblivious to observation, agnostic of meaning, devoid of hope, complete in every possible way.
Romantic love and satisfaction are conceptually oppositional. The idea of romantic love evolved from medival Europe where troubadours flirted professionally with rich married women, but could never consummate the arrangement. The women’s marriages, being arranged, were not for love but political and financial reasons and courtly love (for which there were written rules) was an outlet for this kind of attention and expression. Nowadays we expect our relationships to deliver both titillation and satisfaction simultaneously while still adhering to the letter of monogamy. It’s ambitious… to say the least.
Obejctive isn’t an absolute state. You don’t flip it on and off like a light switch. Rather it is an attitude aimed at viewing events in the context of their purpose. Some have made it out that objectivity precludes the subject, is maybe more related to infinity than direct experience, but this is a mistaken view. There is no object without a corresponding subject, not because of some cosmic oppositional duality, but for precisely the same reason there can be no convex without a corresponding concave, each is a matter of direction, not position. Each presents itself at exactly the same moment in precisely the same way as B-flat and A-sharp.
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Started reading Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” again after a nearly decade long hiatus. I think I know how this ends.
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Beingness is in itself a being.
I’d rather be interested than determined.
