I will stipulate a principle: there are no views on the climb up the mountain which cannot be had from the summit.
I continue my work. I am consciously letting ideas I once would have posted come up, linger a moment, then leave. I am in any event only seeing bits and pieces, and it occurs to me that much of what we call “being an intellectual” is really just being a collector of fragments.
Yes, some intellectuals come up with “Gesamttheorien”, like Marx, but in general they are castles far up in the sky, and to visit them your feet must leave the ground, in an unhealthy way, and your common sense and innate wisdom will never be seen again if you choose to live within them. On Earth, all we see are raining bits and pieces.
But I FEEL–and perhaps I should coin some term for the affective equivalent to what intellectuals do–that heaven is always right here with us. I get flashes. It’s all very simple. Nothing is being withheld.
All of us consist in riverine systems. Experience rains down on us, and flows through channels down to eventual experiential extinction, which is to say forgetting. Perhaps some of it pools in lakes and ponds and inland oceans. This is unprocessed emotional experience.
Heaven is a reconfiguration of all this. I don’t know how. But the key point is that WE CREATE these channels. None of this is necessary.
And this is the point of meditation, to get back to primary experience, within which some part of us can begin to reshuffle things such that we can begin our return, or reemergence, or remembering.
I am actually having somewhat pleasant dreams some nights. This is new.
And I have discovered I can go to a bar, have three drinks, then not buy a six pack on the way home. This is also new for me. And it just hit me this morning that the reason I always bought the six pack is that the brief socializing always made me feel more lonely.
But I am growing in peace, in relationship with myself. It will not be an easy time, if Joe Biden wins. Every whiff that he may pull off what should amount to an upset, and Wall Street tanks. We already know that we have lost an amount of wealth comparable to what happened between 1929 and 1932. An honest Depression, under the helm of an idiot like that, is very definitely possible.
But I signed up for all this. I believe it. We need whatever happens. I need whatever happens; although I will continue to pray Trump triumphs, prosperity returns, and I am able over some time interval to begin to wage my one man cultural war against anomie, sadness, disconnection, and social destruction.