Oh Well

Hello everyone, I'm being murdered. Memories hold the rusty knife, and I can never bleed enough to die. Memories are s'posed to be friends, but I'm apparently playing Caesar, and there's one primal crownstealer, surnamed metaphysical Brutus, who leads the churchless charge. I also call him X, and X in a five year past, in a cluttered collection of memories whose each member brims with unutterable detail -- like a walk through paradise, like a first kiss on a beautified autumn night.

And I can never do enough to escape from it. The memory itself burns, but burns with an added pain: it symbolizes, with all the others, how much I squandered, how many chances I threw away, because -- I was a coward: hypersensitive, neurotically afraid, detailing each possibility and dispensing with each and every one. You're not getting any more detail than that.

And yet, there is nothing I can do to change the mistakes I've made, and more: there's nothing that indicates that they should be changed. I am in the right place -- but how the hell does that erase the past of my mistakes? My entire life could be different had I made a different choice those five years previous -- it would be right then, as it is painfully right now. I don't understand it, but I know it. I know it. Things are right. The external isn't the standard; the internal is. The external is a diversion.

What then? The external, the world out there, registered through sensation, is both everything and nothing -- all we have, and completely irrelevant. I can adore this lovely rose, this pristine collection of Eliotian poetry, only because it is valued -- clasped for -- as nothing; conversely, I can call something nothing if it is valued as something. If I clasp for it, it is nothing, and to clasp for wind is... It (whatever it is) is everything only if it is nothing to me; it is nothing only if it is everything to me.

The sensate is valued as nothing only because inwardness is valued as everything -- and yet, if I value inwardness as everything, it too is nothing. So balance is what is needed -- a balance of zero value on both sides, externality and inwardness. Absolute valuelessness is what is needed for optimal happiness. The inner sanctifies the outer, and the outer sanctifies the inner. A prerequisite is that both terms (the outer and the inner) must be there, and they can only both fully be there in perfect balance with one another. It's like two sides of an equation -- they both obviously must be equal; one can't be negative and another positive.

Consider infinity or inwardness or a life lived dedicted to God, or meaning, or truth, etc. as I.
Consider finitude or externality or a life lived dedicated to the earth, etc. as F.

+I = -F
or
-I = +F
or
I = F

Too much inwardness causes a negation of finitude; example: a person bending towards abstraction, who can't quite optimally live in the sense that he consistently wills himself into the real world. Think of philosophers or mathematicians or poets. They value their abstractions.

Too much finitude causes a negation of infinity; example: a person bending towards externality, sensations. Think of the alcoholic, the clothes-loving sorotity chick. They value their instances of finitude.

Infinity balanced with finitude -- thought balanced with action. Doing what one ought to do (finitude) the moment one grasps it (infinity).

You are the equation.

Goal: value nothing. Not your car, not your wife, not your khakis; not your mathematical ideas, or your philosophical abstractions, or your bloody thoughts. And in not valuing them you'll gain the most that can be gained from them -- because there is equality, and with equality comes perfection for both terms. Movement with content, not content without movement, or movement without content. But you can't simply not value by fiat; you will value something by necessity. A third factor is needed. What is it?

I call it the Logos. It exists in abstraction -- but as pure abstraction it is valued as abstraction, and I need something beyond abstraction -- I also need finitude. So: it must exist in a perfect balance between abstraction and finitude, and this is possible only through living it out.

You see, commandment isn't left for the slaves, for the subordinate of the world. Commandment, if it is inwardly qualified (i.e., through the Logos, the Word, the Meaning), is the most precious thing in the history of the cosmos for human beings. Logos commandment allows for the balance between finitude and infinity, action and thought. Without commandment life, in the perfected qualitative sense, could not be possible. If a human being did not have an eternal consciousness...

So now it makes sense. To love the will of God -- that really makes sense. And if God is understood as founded in his will, just as we are founded in our wills (we are our freedom), and the will of God is synonymous with the Logos (for a Word needs to be written), and the Logos is as much God as the writer of this Logos, then to love the will of God is nothing less than to love God.

Brilliant.