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January 8 - January 12, 2019
You step forward to take your place in the dominance hierarchy, and occupy your territory, manifesting your willingness to defend, expand and transform it.
(it means acting to please God, in the ancient language).
So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them—at least the same right as others.
Stand up straight, with your shoulders back.
What could it be about people that makes them prefer their pets to themselves? It was an ancient story in the Book of Genesis—the first book in the Old Testament—that helped me find an answer to that perplexing question.
It
Difference between fiction and non fiction.
However, the world of experience has primal constituents, as well. These are the necessary elements whose interactions define drama and fiction. One of these is chaos. Another is order. The third (as there are three) is the process that mediates between the two, which appears identical to what modern people call consciousness.
It is proper understanding of the third that allows us the only real way out.
Tao. The middle path. The way.
And Chaos is freedom, dreadful freedom, too.
After that nigh-instantaneous, deeply reflexive bodily response comes the later-evolving, more complex but slower responses of emotions—and, after that, comes thinking,
Over the millennia, as our brain capacity increased and we developed curiosity to spare, we became increasingly aware of and curious about the nature of the world—what we eventually conceptualized as the objective world—outside
Many things begin to fall into place when you begin to consciously understand the world in this manner. It’s as if the knowledge of your body and soul falls into alignment with the knowledge of your intellect.
you’re so engrossed in what you’re doing you don’t notice—it
In the flow.
Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering.
We have seen the enemy, after all, and he is us.
The worst of all possible snakes is the eternal human proclivity for evil. The worst of all possible snakes is psychological, spiritual, personal, internal.
that would mean only that another danger would emerge: that of permanent human infantilism and absolute uselessness.
And so we return to our original query: Why would someone buy prescription medication for his dog, and then so carefully administer it, when he would not do the same for himself?
We are next fated to contemplate morality itself.
Only man will inflict suffering for the sake of suffering. That is the best definition of evil I have been able to formulate.
What then is to be done?
produces a narrative sequence almost unbearable in its profundity.
We remember, so to speak. We remain eternally nostalgic for the innocence of childhood, the divine, unconscious Being of the animal, and the untouched cathedral-like old-growth forest.
The original state of Nature, conceived in this manner, is paradisal. But we are no longer one with God and Nature, and there is no simple turning back.
They exercised no choice. God knows, that’s easier. But maybe it’s not better than, for example, goodness genuinely earned.
Perhaps it is instead our unwillingness—reflected in Adam’s shamed hiding—to walk with God, despite our fragility and propensity for evil.
This is the crux. Surely right. Accept your flaws but step out and on it is your right and responsibility.
is presented as a remedy for that Fall, a way out of evil.
If we wish to take care of ourselves properly, we would have to respect ourselves—but we don’t, because we are—not least in our own eyes—fallen creatures.
They have the opposite problem: they shoulder intolerable burdens of self-disgust, self-contempt, shame and self-consciousness.
they don’t value themselves at all, and they don’t take care of themselves with attention and skill.
It is not virtuous to be victimized by a bully, even if that bully is oneself.
Yet people prevail and continue to do difficult and effortful tasks to hold themselves and their families and society together.
To treat yourself as if you were someone you are responsible for helping is, instead, to consider what would be truly good for you.
You need to consider the future and think, “What might my life look like if I were caring for myself properly?
Don’t underestimate the power of vision and direction.
Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination and articulate your Being.
natural pride and forthright confidence of someone who has learned once again to walk with God in the Garden.
You could begin by treating yourself as if you were someone you were responsible for helping.
But the winters were worse. Then your friends mattered. More than anything.
Both were aiming upward. Their decisions to do so bolstered mine.
You can’t escape who you have been.
He was accompanied by a friend. It
was his friend I really remember.
“I had friends,” he said.62 “Before. Anyone with enough self-contempt that they could forgive me mine.”
What was it that made Chris and Carl and Ed unable (or, worse, perhaps, unwilling) to move or to change their friendships and improve the circumstances of their lives?
which these differences are immutably part and parcel of someone is greater than an optimist might presume or desire.
Why did he—like his cousin, like my other friends—continually choose people who, and places that, were not good for him?
People create their worlds with the tools they have directly at hand. Faulty tools produce faulty results.
It’s partly fate. It’s partly inability. It’s partly … unwillingness to learn? Refusal to learn? Motivated refusal to learn?
When it’s not just naïveté, the attempt to rescue someone is often fuelled by vanity and narcissism.
But should you turn your back if it costs little why not try? Maybe the help just sustains the problem.
