I'd Like to Say Something

I have absolutely no idea where I'm going in life. The East would call this a virtue; Zen, pour exemple, is the realization of the fallacy of tensed existence -- neither the past nor the future exists, but only the present (and there is no singular experiencer of this present; the inner and the outer is a single monistic entity), and the task of the (pseudo-)individual is to "play it all by ear", and let the cosmos sweep oneself along. But the West, ah, to the West this is a symptom of disease. Everyone must at least have a hazy impression -- the shred of an inkling of secure, insulating certainty, whether this certainty is grounded in delusion or not, and it always to a degree is. Well, I don't have this impression. Or, better to say, I refuse to submit to the temptation to having one. And I don't understand why the hell anyone either should or could have such a thing. We're like children running naked down a beach convinced we're fully clothed, laughing corrosively when someone tells us we're not.

There is no sin in planning. There is danger: the danger of losing the spontaneity of the world, thereby losing the world -- the synthesis of subject and object -- completely. And, oh resentful religieux, it isn't the world that steals one's soul, but the resignation of the soul to the world, which is infinitely qualitatively different. The world isn't a foreign, mechanical "out-there" that merely panders with our minds and tempts our wills; the world is very much a basis for our being, for all breath needs a breather; all souls need bodies; and all bodies exist in the world. To lose the world is to thus lose oneself, for the human being is a synthesis between soul and body (not a vague, incomprehensible ghost in a machine, of all outdated Cartesian hangovers). The world, in its proper relation, is meant at the least to teach, at the most to bless, and it can function only through serendipity -- through the sponatenous dance between self and its malleable physical backdrop called "world". Steal serendipity; put in its place a categorized conceptual network of ideational preplanning. Do this and you've only painted the walls of the world with your own pathetic little self. Your preexisting concepts have taken over. You have blocked the world out; ideas, remember, are also based on phenomena, outer existence -- the objectivity that "is" that subjectivity feeds on.

What is it that pushes the man who wants order? Fear, perhaps; he fears himself against the backdrop of the nakedness of the world. This fear is absolutely incomptabile with any palatable understanding of faith. Faith, at heart, is the letting go of one's desire for omnipotence, for control of one's own world, into the hands of God, who is capable of finishing where finitude falters. Faith is the art of breathing. With the newness of the world under the rubric of experience one breathes in -- one criticizes and integrates the "out there" through one's God-relation; and through freedom one exhales one's own little being on the world, shifting it, imperceptibly at times, conspicuously at others, according to the force and manner of how one exhales, according to the relative completion of one's continual part. Breathing, faith, is the synthesis between these two terms, not simply, as is the popular quip of theological circles, believing the right things. One must believe -- and act! One must open himself to realization and work accordingly. Faith without works is dead. Breathing without exhalation is fatal fantasy.

We don't need consciousness of our direction outside of four or five steps. History has shown us continually that ideas so charismatically clung to with the conviction of rightness have been either been revised beyond realization, or carelessly discarded. Personal experience has taught us that deception feeds, voraciously, on the inclination to expectation; again and again, whether through our own eyes or in witnessing others, we've seen the truth bleed through broken hearts. No, we must admit to our ignorance. Only then can we find value in trust, the perfection of faith. Only then can we learn to breathe freely, not constricted or elated with each uncertain tidbit that comes our way. No, if there is a kingdom at all accessible for anyone on earth, it must be within, uncorruptible by the world, unswervable by perception, cleansed and quarantined from all negativities that work themselves towards unhappiness. We need an unshakeable hope, or else despair is only a matter of time. And how tragic, how sad, that these words are music only for mystics:

"Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." -- Luke 17:21