Month: March 2015

My personal opinion is that being able to live in the moment–which of course is a very trendy spiritual goal, talked about among others by Eckhart Tolle and every Zen master who ever lived–is the PRODUCT of personal growth, not its means.

What is the effect of trauma?  Intrusions, as Judith Herman calls them.  Thoughts, feelings, avoidances that come and go, seemingly beyond our control.  And I think trauma–and the American habit of never sustaining focus on anything–are the two principle enemies of Present-Centeredness; and the former, at least, is in my view best not dealt with directly.

All wisdom must be assigned a time, place, and person.  What is splendid one moment for one person can be profoundly destructive for another person in the same moment.

In this respect, I will reiterate my personal fondness for Sufism–or, rather, to the body of practice and ideas which is most usefully aggregated under that term, to the extent such a thing is possible.

One saying that has stayed with me is that wisdom cannot be withheld from one ready for it, and cannot be given by anyone unready for it.  Every day you walk blindly by everything you could ever need to know about this universe.  So do I.  And we are both imbeciles.

I don’t think one person in a hundred EVER consciously chooses goodness or evil.  I think they do what they were programmed to do. If they were raised in happy families, then being nice is a simple thing.  Sharing happiness is a simple thing.  But it is not a choice, per se.

True engagement with life is a true engagement with morality, with struggling to do the right thing, after first struggling to determine what that thing IS, relatively speaking, which is to say what is mostly right.  It is a mission to see the world every day the way it is, and consciously be brave, consciously be caring, consciously cultivating the emotional and behavioral flexibility to react appropriately, no matter what comes down the pike.

And I think the people who do this best don’t know they are doing it.

I will grant that I like the Odd Thomas character.  I’ve read all but 1 of the books, less the latest.  It’s perhaps a bit simplistic, but I tend to like Dean Koontz’s moralizing.

That’s all on that for now.