Well, it’s almost been a year since I started this blog. I was in a much better spot enthusiasm-speaking. (“Enthusiasm” = possessed by a god’s essence) This year I feel groggy and confused and stressed. My insight has not left me, but old problems have come to haunt me. I have returned to my home country that I left so long ago, the land of restlessness. Now armed with new skills, I understand that venturing into displeasant sectors of the mind for some time is not doom. Neuroplasticity can change me back. I know how to effect change in my own mind, I have memories of the monuments, the cairns I placed so that I know the way back. Sometimes it is a wilderness. However, unlike a year ago, I’m not quite as chronically disposed to depression. I can laugh some things off. Strongly contrary to popular opinion, the act of laughing toward pain is not what makes the Dalai Lama and Christ giggle about human folly. To arrive at that point requires such great depth, many inner chasms to be crossed. They are common to man, to humanity. I’ve come into the territory of the laughter-filled ones.

I don’t like feeling entangled with my shadow side, yet the span between shadow and light is so small. An obvious vanity about appearances or money is just like any stress. The only difference is in the disposition to affirm or negate the vanity. And if I’ve just spent years learning about how to love my stress, then it is not far off to love my vanity or to love it in others. There lie the secrets to overcoming the masses, the writhing stresses of others pushing and pulling on us, the colossal rip tide tossing us to-and-fro against the rocky shore. There also lie the secrets to will and to sensing/acting purely alongside rich reflection. As in every good story, the treasure is hidden in a dragon’s clutches. Every master or hero has had to go after his or her dragon and find the treasure hidden there. Even Jesus had his own dragon to face. His struggles and suffering was particular to his personality, insofar as his service was being rejected and abused. Jesus, after all, had a personality—something Jesus-followers today tend to heavily overlook. The gospels should be understand with attention given to all the specifics of Jesus’ life that can be drawn up from historical and narrative memory. Sometimes we add layers through time that gives us greater insight, but there is a base layer from which the various unfoldings of meaning, the various evolutions occur. Jesus-followers tend to be a cult conflating his personality with his Christly mission. I do not hate the cult of Jesus, as I would identify with it, though I will not specify how and how much (for that would put measure on something whose meaning is beyond measure), but I seriously dislike being pulled along to believe and align myself with a conflation of divinity with personality.

Jesus was a specific man with a grand, overarching set of purposes. The divinity is not so much in his attention to caring for others, nor in his great aspirations, but rather in the marriage between his personality with his purpose. Who Jesus was was greater than his specific appearance characteristics, which was the dominant religious view of his time. People had to act outwardly, and many so-called sinners reacted against this attitude by holding to an inward light, which was very dim. Jesus came to them to affirm this truth. They were holy. Just as the appearance was a fragile gift, so too was the inward sectors of a human being, and far more greatly a rich area. “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” Jesus stood as an intermediary between reflection and action. He knew what he was becoming, as an image making visible the path of God for all to see. (I’m avoiding major theological debates because they tend to not be objectively motivated—they’re usually driven by a whole complex of unconscious forces, “elemental spirits of the world” as St Paul would call them, rather than the holy spirit; which does not make them bad, but it makes them inadequate for clearly realizing the truths of the gospel; as psychological forces, they’re not doomed to falling short of the glory of God, since God is still with them, they simply require a great deal of soil-tilling and growth, and I’m not wanting to go down that path again right now. End hopefully-helpful-for-posterity meta-commentary.)

The import of this teaching—that Jesus had a personality—means that there is a particular task and a general task of spiritual labor to be done. The particular activities have particular solutions. You have a whole set of things you should do and areas you could use some growth. The generalized tasks have generic solutions. You realize the intuitive nature with the intuitive nature, you see into and under the surface veneer of the expected reality. It is a touching and tapping into more than a clearcut, denotative realization. It is process knowledge, process solution, whereas the specific task is met by state knowledge, state solution. The body of specific tasks is not inherently lesser or grosser for being materialized, just as the cloud of inward generic tasks is not inherently free of gross materialism. The body is spiritual and the mind is corporeal. This is why Jesus works for so many people. He crosses the specific and the general. That’s the real engine at work in the Christ narrative, and everything else is an offshoot or a distortion. To be a good Christ-follower does not demand being a generic, ecumenical Christ-follower; since Christ crosses the particular and the general, it shows that one can access the generic from the specific and the specific from the generic. To be an active spiritual laborer is not without its share of spirituality. To be a contemplative spiritual laborer is not without its share of work.

All of this is just to say that my inward journey has called me out into a muck, a quandary, a quagmire (great words, by the way). For some reason, quandary always strikes me as close to quarry. A Gordian knot is something with great potential. A rich mineral supply to be cut and reutilized. Something to be unfolded. Where does it begin? In the solid chunks? In the molecular structure? Where is the evolution? Maybe I’ll take up origami some day, as an old man spying into the cosmic heart of nature while appearing to merely love a delightful activity for children. (That’s an adult’s perspective, as children have not yet forgotten the innate divinity of play. We lose touch with the reality when we start focusing in on the words for things in adolescence, and hard-to-define things become practically unreal. “I didn’t know how to name you then.” The Tree of Life) Now that I am an old fledgling in spiritual land, which is really all one can or should ever hope to become, I realize that there is a great effort of stone-cutting to be done within myself, within others, within the world, and humans have but a very small slice of the pie. There is potentially a multiverse beyond sensibility, and the view that everything is limited to what seems to be is extremely narrow; not that narrowness is inherently wrong, for after all, (1) how could anything be if all we can know is what we can sense, and (2) if everything is what it is, then there is a great peace of acceptance that follows (one can falsely live away from the really tangible things in abstract multiverses; yet the desire to avoid a concrete reality does not eliminate the truth potential of there “being” other invisible worlds). When one steps onto the doorstep of the particular-general difference, innumerable streams of wisdom become accessible. Contrary to ordinary stressors, we do not have to do anything. There is a gospel, a good news, of relaxing into the intuited arms of heaven. And contrary to the opposite of ordinary stressors, it is not pure inaction and detachment that is necessary for the spiritual path (though silence and awayness really help in hearing the echoes in our minds). There is an ongoing silence that can be cultivated. In a real way, there is a work free from the typical work-stresses, or if it is not rid of them, at least it is unconditioned by them, it is prior to them, primary. One can make inner movements just as one can make outer movements. You are not constrained to acting in any one particular way. The sense of being limited is not false, it is only local and after-the-fact. That you are the way you are might be influenced by countless factors, but that those things are the way they are is given by something else. Thus in everything there is something other deeply hidden. Inside you yourself this is. You are not bound the way polished language is bound, which is the bounding force that dominates our ordinary life. Discretized expectation. Gross materialism. Focus without periphery. You are free to engage the whole world of inner kinesthetics, which is really the implicit or sometimes explicit topic of all religions and cultures.

Now note that when I say “inner,” I don’t really mean inner in a spatial sense. In a spatial sense, yes, sometimes there is correspondence, such as reflecting with your eyes closed sitting still. In that case, yes there is both spatial inner and the other inner on display. But otherwise, I mean “inner” in a sort of figurative language, where the spatial act of reflection with eyes closed sitting still is an example. It’s like how Democritus used water, earth, fire, air as four elements when now we have a different meaning for “elements” as well as an expanded definition for states of matter. Water stood in for liquid, earth for solid, fire for plasma, air for gas. That’s a pretty good estimation, but he lacked a generic way of framing those states. And so the games of medieval metaphysics with four elements and humours and whatnot were often really proxy physics and proxy knowledge. After all, alchemy and Jewish hermeticism is how Newton got to a place where he could think how to formulate laws describing his empirical studies of mechanics. A stark empiricist lacks the insight to gain any traction with regard to the facts. So when I say there is a whole world of “inward” kinesthetics, I’m meaning “inward” it in a figurative way for something I don’t have rigorous language for yet, just as the medievals did. But it is very real and and very critical to daily life and therefore deserves our attention.

In this twofold negation of not mere outward not mere inward, what is left? If one is led into the spiritual inwardness, the general field of human nature, through intuitions of need to recover from the incessant strains and strivings of worldly life, that collapsing in from the outer world of states and corresponding expansion into the multiplicities of inner processes, what is to come after every particular path has been exhausted, or at least a sense of general realization has come? When one is tired of going down every road, just as one was tired of being pulled by the world? One spent so much time searching for the highest meanings and greatest spanning truths, so that the least amount of harm could be realized. So that one would stand unstained and unspotted from the blights of this obsessive world, as an angel incarnate, a vision, a window into heaven. What comes after this when there are no longer any greatest truths to impel one onward? Is there something else to be arrived at? What is the biggest reality I can live for, the best aim, the best way? Once you’ve come to this point, there does not seem to be anything after it. One true generalization covers all of it. Yes, there is meta-meta-meta-meta-meta-… turtles all the way down. But one meta is a meta once and for all, in a way. The sense of clearing up all uncertainties is fictitious, a mood that passes and comes again. For if generalized knowledge (wisdom) is the goal of the path, and wisdom is itself a state of process, not simply a state, then it has no fixed object. Does one move past this? What’s next? The first movement of the spiritual epic is thus completed.

There is something different from greatness in all its forms. Everything is tathata, happenstance, it is that it is. All is gift. Perhaps one will step back into a partisan focus, such as on origami, baseball, cooking, certain people and localities, customs, etc. setting that condition as their ordinate for life.
Or maybe one will move beyond a global understanding surmounting the powers of mind, developing totally new ways of thinking, paradigms, truths, processes, realities, testing them out, exploring, ever-exploring, sometimes exploring, never again. There is a whole list of unworded adjectives I wish I could express. Alas, I am a child, ever a child. I don’t know what I will write next, what I will do next. (Well, actually, I do sort of.)


March 5th, 2021
San Luis Obispo