Month: November 2023

Mystery of being alive.

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What’s something you believe everyone should know.

Survival, security, personal relationships, prestige, self-development- in my experience, those are exactly the values that a mythically inspired person doesn’t live for. They have to do with the primary biological mode as understood by human consciousness. Mythology begins where madness starts. A person who is truly gripped by a calling, by a dedication, by a belief, by a zeal, will sacrifice his security, will sacrifice even his life, will sac- rifice personal relationships, will sacrifice prestige, and will think nothing of personal development; he will give himself entirely to his myth. Christ gives you the clue when he says, “He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.”

Maslow’s five values are the values for which people live when they have nothing to live for. Nothing has seized them, nothing has caught them, nothing has driven them spiritually mad and made them worth talking to. These are the bores. (In a marvelous footnote to an essay on Don Quixote, Ortega y Gasset once wrote, “A bore is one who deprives us of our solitude without providing companionship.”

The awakening of awe is the key here, what Leo Frobenius, the won- derful student of African cultures, called Ergriffenheit, being seized by something so that you are pulled out.

We live, on this side of the mystery, in the realm of the pairs of opposites: true and false, light and dark, good and evil, male and female, and all that dualistic rational worldview. One can have an intuition that is beyond good and evil, that goes beyond pairs of opposites – that’s the opening of this gateway into the mystery.”

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We are all one, metaphysical breakthrough

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“How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that it moves me to action?”-Schopenhauer

This is something really mysterious, something for which Reason can provide no explanation, and for which no basis can be found in practical experience. It is nevertheless of common occurrence, and everyone has had the experience. It is not unknown even to the most hard-hearted and self- interested. Examples appear every day before our eyes of instant responses of this kind, without reflection, one person helping another, coming to his aid, even setting his own life in clear danger for someone whom he has seen for the first time, having nothing more in mind than that the other is in need and in peril of his life.”-Schopenhauer

There was an article in the New York papers a few months ago about a kid who dove into the Hudson River to save a drowining dog and then had to be saved himself. When asked why he’d dove in, he said, “Because it was my dog.” Then there was the girl who went into a burning building-twice-to save her little brother and sister, and when she was asked why she’d done that, she said, “Because I loved them.”

Such a one is then acting, Schopenhauer answers, out of an instinctive recognition of the truth that he and that other in fact are one. He has been moved not from the lesser, secondary knowledge of himself as separate from the others, but from an immediate experience of the greater, truer truth, that we are all one in the ground of our being.

That’s the power. These people didn’t know if they had the strength or not. It’s not duty, not reckoning. It is a flash: a breakthrough of the reality of this life that lives in us. At such moments, you realize that you and that other are, in fact, one. It’s a big realization.

Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one.

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