The hour is getting late...

William Wildblood believes that time is running-out - and I agree...

When I look around me it seems that most people in the Western world are completely oblivious to any kind of deeper reality. They don't appear to think very seriously about who or what they are but carry on with their lives as though appearance were reality, absorbed in their usually unimportant work and petty distractions as though these actually meant something....

Perhaps, and I certainly am not dismissing anyone since everything in our contemporary society conspires to obscure truth. Nevertheless, how anyone can live in this world without making huge mental efforts to try to work out what it is and what it means and what they should be doing to live life in a way that corresponds to reality is an enigma. 

The problem of existence is not solved by evading it, and if it is lack of interest that prompts the refusal to look at what this world and our life mean, that is even worse. 

So many people really seem to think that it is an intellectual luxury to try to penetrate the mystery of life or else they all too readily assume that there is no mystery and that life is what it appears to be, a meaningless accident which must just be made the most of. They seem to have little or no intellectual or spiritual curiosity, especially not in a way that would actually be applicable to their lives and open up something more than the fulfilment of ephemeral desires whether to do with mind or body...

Read the whole thing...


William signs-off by stating his conviction that 'the hour is getting late'. What might this mean, in practice?

My understanding of the way that this works, is that when something needs doing - when it must be done -  the longer the delay, then the worse the consequences will be.

This is a kind of law. If things are done at the right time, then there is usually the possibility of a gradual and reasonably comfortable transition. But doing the right thing always entails some degree of short-term sacrifice in order to attain the best long-term consequences.

In other words, the short- and long-term are different; so that doing the best thing to optimise the short term will take you further and further away from what is best for the long term...

Until, eventually, the long term arrives.

At that point it may be too late. But even when it is not too late, there is an unavoidable accumulation of problems from all those years, decades, generations-worth of easy, expedient short termist decisions. They amount to a large deficit that must be paid - one way or another.

Of course, it may be that this deficit cost is so great as to be lethal. But even when it is not lethal, it will extract a very heavy price in exactly that suffering which all those cowardly, greedy, short-termist decisions were hoping to evade.

As I said - I regard this as a kind of law of life.

So, what are the costs that we have accumulated? In essence they are material costs of spiritual life. We ought to have been abandoning our superficial pleasure-seeking ways; but we preferred to avoid the necessary cost in immediate pleasure and consumption.

When the spiritual necessity is forced upon us; the price extracted will be hedonic: paid in pleasure, comfort, convenience, material goods, amusing and distracting technologies etc.

As I see thing, this is literally unavoidable; and the longer delayed, the bigger the cost will be.

The time for payment by easy instalments is long past. Soon, the debt-collectors will be calling. And they will collect in full. 

Be prepared... spiritually prepared, that is.