Back on topic, for how many of them is their principal positive attribute tranquility? Peace of mind? Calm?
I had said some time ago that I didn’t “get” the seated Buddha, since my life is not spent sitting. But I think I do now: this figure symbolizes FINALLY getting some rest from the worries and troubles, doubts, hopes, fears, sadnesses, and everything else that come with human life.
Yes, of course this is obvious, and yes of course I am stupid for not getting this. But I was sitting today, doing my Kum Nye, and just watching all the endless parade of emotions and images, and realizing that behind it all there is rest.
And I would argue that tranquility is perhaps the most important virtue, because without it all other virtues are expressed compulsively, which is to say inauthentically, mechanically.
True love proceeds from tranquility. It takes an untroubled spirit to offer true empathy without grasping, to give without expectation or need of reciprocation.
We all want to have a happy, untroubled heart, and you must have one to offer it. There is no other way.
We would do well to value more this virtue, which is our workaday world has I think come to seem useless, even though with it you can both work harder and longer.
I looked up the Babylonian numbering system. If you look at the actual symbols, it looks to me like Base Ten. Of course, math has never been my strong suit.
It is odd to contemplate what a strange thing it is that it took so long to invent zero. As I have said often though, it hard enough to see what is THERE, but even harder to see what is not there. Zero symbolizes what is missing. This is something. That is why we have a symbol for it.
I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny
blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny
they are small, and the fountain is in France
where you wrote me that last letter and
I answered and never heard from you again.
you used to write insane poems about
ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you
knew famous artists and most of them
were your lovers, and I wrote back, it’ all right,
go ahead, enter their lives, I’ not jealous
because we’ never met. we got close once in
New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never
touched. so you went with the famous and wrote
about the famous, and, of course, what you found out
is that the famous are worried about
their fame –– not the beautiful young girl in bed
with them, who gives them that, and then awakens
in the morning to write upper case poems about
ANGELS AND GOD. we know God is dead, they’ told
us, but listening to you I wasn’ sure. maybe
it was the upper case. you were one of the
best female poets and I told the publishers,
editors, “ her, print her, she’ mad but she’
magic. there’ no lie in her fire.” I loved you
like a man loves a woman he never touches, only
writes to, keeps little photographs of. I would have
loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a
cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom,
but that didn’ happen. your letters got sadder.
your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all
lovers betray. it didn’ help. you said
you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and
the bridge was over a river and you sat on the crying
bench every night and wept for the lovers who had
hurt and forgotten you. I wrote back but never
heard again. a friend wrote me of your suicide
3 or 4 months after it happened. if I had met you
I would probably have been unfair to you or you
to me. it was best like this.
As Tarthang Tulku has explained–at least, as I have understood him–across a number of books, work well done is something you enter in to, it is something which expands. It is something you participate in, not something you “do to”.
Where else can you be physically, but here and now? Why not be here and now perceptually as well? Here and now is the only place you have to become larger and duller, in the sense of being diffused, not sharp.
There is a place for the open blade, but its uses are rare.
Again, not entirely sure what I am saying, but you can print this out, and use the back of the paper for a To Do or grocery list.
Has it ever occurred to you that the referent for “that” can be infinite?
And does not every that short of that that exist within a context with a background, and if we look at that background, and the background to that background, do we not in time wind up with infinity again?
I have no idea what I am saying, but that has never stopped me before.
My comment: I understand VERY well the comforts of abstraction in chaotic situations. If you can find that wavelength, stress actually makes you more effective.
What it also does, though, is split your persona into the emotional part and the logical part. Granting at the outset that no good answer is possible, it is tempting to wonder if Wittgenstein died prematurely due to unprocessed emotions, and the solitude they necessitated.