The point of heaven

You know, I often find myself weeping.  I weep for myself, for the weak, for the suffering in the world.  I welcome it, in general.  It means emotions are flowing, that I am alive.  I cried at Wonder Woman, at her quest to change the world for the better.  This is my own quest, too, and it seems so daunting.  There is so much fire and death, so much hatred, reflexive, willful, and willed ignorance, so many species of disgust and rejection, even of the better angels within us all.

And I have flows of energy hit me sometimes.  One did today, and I was trying to ride it to an answer to the question of why we should pursue heaven, despite all our pain.  Pain is so addictive.  Look in your own heart: you will see it to be true, or so I suppose.

What would it be like to live for thousands of years on the Wonder Woman isle (I did not quite catch the name), a place where “nothing ever happens”?  David Byrne, with his usual neurotic cynicism, captures the problem: would it not be BORING?  You know everyone.  You are perfectly safe.  You eat the same food, do the same things.

I have not read extensively on it, but in my limited understanding L. Ron Hubbard preached that all of us are spirits who once lived in perfect harmony and who got bored, so we created problems, we created hell, we created conflict and difficulty, knowing it would all sort itself out across eternity.

What is Duhkha, really?  A deep understanding of it, and Nirvana, go hand in hand.  You cannot separate the one from the other.  You can stipulate Duhkha, you can believe in Duhkha and the Path out of it, but you cannot REALLY “grok” it until you pass beyond it, and look at it from the outside.

So much of life depends on so much faith.  We must climb hills which we hope have been honest in their promises, but we can never know anything but that climbing makes us better climbers, and that if the truth lies on high, whatever we do searching for it conditions us to eventually find it.

I have been holding a post on Socrates, and the Western intellectual tradition, and will do so some more.  It doesn’t feel right posting it yet.  But I will note that after a lifetime of searching Socrates took with him to the grave, apparently with some satisfaction, the truth that he knew nothing at all.

Fire destroys.  But it also purifies, does it not?  Is anything in the world just what it is, and not also something else too?

The metaphor which presently works best for me is life as dance, living as dancing, as moving gracefully, as both leading and reacting, as interacting and separating, one within a whole, a whole within one, the universe as a self similar dance floor, filled with light, and the possibility for the benighted ones to see and feel something else.