One of the most misleading aspects of hearing tell of high the experience of spiritual exaltation, is that such high states have been paid-for by servitude: to experience the kind of powerful enchantment that gets written about, extracts a cost in exacerbated mundane living.
Consider a successful pilgrimage - long and arduous, expensive and tedious travel, and all the organization beforehand. The spiritual high point must be been paid for in advance and upfront.
Or meditation. Months and years of routine, work, training, tedium; seeking a breakthrough into an "enlightenment" of understanding and bliss - which (unless death follows quickly) is, itself, inevitably a state, dissolving into the mundane again.
Such is the nature of this mortal life on this world: a trade-off, on unfavourable terms.
The heights entail extra depths; just as that "holiday of a lifetime" entails a preceding lifetime of daily drudgery.
At the most fundamental level - the business of staying alive (food, shelter, clothes, defence etc) exacts long hours and heavy responsibilities.
And there is no way out, no escape - so long as we live this is the equation, the scales are tipped against us.
We can try not to think about this, can try to pretend it is not so; can distract ourselves, even obliterate our awareness with extreme intoxication - but this is the reality, and it is much, much harder even to ignore this reality than people pretend.
It is one thing to say that we don't need to think about it, that sensible people just "get on with" the business of life-as-is; or that we change change our perspective to concentrate on the good and re-interpret the bad stiff so as to enjoy it.
Easy to say, easy to claim! And yet to me the evidence is overwhelming that the existential nature of peoples' actual lives, and the deep and persisting pathologies of actual human society, distinctly undermine such optimistic but facile attempts at re-framing.
Reality, yes; but not the only reality!
There is far more to life than this harsh equation, thanks be!
But it is the start of wisdom to acknowledge this situation as an inescapable, daily - hourly, fact of the human condition.
Such is the "existential" perspective - the overview of human existence; but such recognition ought to be a starting-point to consider what are its implications for each of us, personally.
Contrary to the atheistic-existentialists of the mid-twentieth century; grasping the existential perspective is not supposed to be the terminus of thinking, nor an excuse for not-thinking.
From the EP as a baseline; we need to grasp the situation as is; and as fully as possible, as honestly as possible - from our own a inward point of view.
The aim being to establish what, given the solid-reality of the situation, we would most want; and what possibilities we believe are available.
No comments:
Post a Comment