SENECA

The human is born dependent and then acquires many dependents itself. The body is the first and foremost; requiring feeding, clothing, cleaning and much time for sleeping. While it is your obligation to accept its dependency, you have a duty to reject its tyranny. 

"My food is not tasty enough, my clothes not fine enough, my soap unperfumed".  

You will hear the philosopher say: “Hunger is cheap, it is the palette that is expensive”. So, limit the limiters and reserve some time to transcend your situation, daily, at least for a little while each time.  

Notice too that in a crowd of people, it is quickly determined who is the wisest and all defer to that person so that he or she may make the acts of the whole group proper and decent. Similarly, one hour spent worthwhile makes the whole day worth your while. For to banish anger, anxiety, fear, envy, greed and hate from your being is the basis and ultimate act of heroism, accomplished hour by hour, deed by deed, moment by moment; requiring nothing but your own self; away from constant dependency and into eternal liberty. 

Restlessness is yearning: desires unfulfilled. Desires are either within oneself and within reach or without oneself and out of reach. You have been told that “what nature requires is close by and easy to obtain; all that sweat is for superfluities”. - (Seneca) 

Do you not see how they soil themselves with acts of greed due to their desire for wealth when they could give themselves frugality, which is needed both in wealth as well as in poverty? Do you not see them degrade themselves with acts of flattery, when they could make themselves worthy of their own approval, which is needed both in fame as well as in obscurity? They seek without what they are neglecting within and make themselves undeserving of it. 

Stop your perspiration for gratification; there is only one good: that which you can give yourself. There is only one bad: that which will make you morally worse; and only you can allow that. 

We are born crying, unknowingly, for attention and continue the practice, knowingly, for quite some time; some do forever. Anyone who gives us what we are crying for, we take to be a friend. We must be careful what we wish for; attention is of the same nature as the consciousness from which it emanates. The attention of a dim and lame consciousness will further darken and deform the consciousness that desires any and all attention. Like really does seek like but it is up to us to determine our like, to improve our own self and to then give free reign to seeking. 

Once a likeable like is found, we must commit fully: this is a fellow, this is a friend, and it is unto them that we practice the appropriate virtues such as generosity, in time and in resources. Those who are too generous with their generosity find nothing to give to those who deserve everything. 

This commitment should be awarded not only to whomever is at the top of the class, but to those who cross the threshold too; expect that even the top may fall short of it and do not be afraid to dismiss the whole class. You are looking for gold, not the next best thing in the dirt. 

It is high time now for us to outgrow the toys and trinkets we have become accustomed to and to not replace them with other playthings. It hardly does any good to throw out the toy house and to go on desiring one in full scale; rather, learn to be at home where you are now and to make your home wherever it is that you must take your leave to, sooner or later. 

And is death not where we are all headed? Does the master not say that “to learn how to live is to learn how to die”? Go on then to your final aim, leave the toys and distractions to those who have a need for them. In your own case, if you see them playing with wooden swords, be reminded of courage, if you see them emulating domestic duties, be reminded of the household and governance that is the universe, of unity and of infinity. If they trip over their toys and cry, be reminded of transience and that profane pleasures are always followed by tears. As you wipe their eyes, be reminded of kinship and your common nature, that you are born for each other. 

“Will you not play with us, have you had enough?” It is not that I had enough, but that I want more. I realize that I do not yet have the highest Good: I am still afraid to die when I could rejoice in life; I am still harsh with others when I could be kind to myself, I am still greedy for what I can’t have when I could be rich with what I do have. I am not yet simple, honest, just, modest, kind and reasonable. 

“Come then, let’s make a start today and I will surprise you with the resonance of your echo; how once spoken, these things ring out and become amplified both within oneself as well as in others.”

If I still hold the belief that I have been born into my identity, that identity is something that one can be born into at all, that one’s identity needs to be expressed, showcased and in any way affirmed by anyone or anything, then I am still a very little soul. 

If I still talk about the past conquests of an army that marched in the name of some governing body that administers the patch of land that I was born on as being “my” conquest and “our” patch of land, then I have walked into a cage, for I have made the imagined identity of a mob consisting of past, present and future people my own; their pride, fears, complexes, glories, defeats, dreams and horrors are brooding within me now too. 

If I still think that, much like the victory of a small nation must be recognized by at least most of the world to become history, my little self too must be affirmed, confirmed and recognized by at least most people to become my identity, then I am still very weak. Each objector and denier of global or personal history threatens my existence then; and indeed, don’t wars break out over this? 

The world is not so mean as I make it out to be. My struggle for existence, my fight to be allowed to be, is self-imposed while my true self is always ready to receive whatever higher good I come across: that which neither needs confirmation or affirmation nor even looks for it. 

If I identify with honesty, will I not be honest? 

If I identify with kindness, will I not be kind? 

If I identify with justice, will I not be just? 

Who can affirm me in this; who can deny it to me? And whether I would prefer to be the citizen of this or that country, a part of this or that culture, would that country and culture not benefit from me as an honest fellow, a just citizen, the most? 

I must stop then, at once, to put my worth within the reach of others and start to put it higher, higher still, where it belongs and where no one can touch it. This is what they mean, do they not, when they say: know thyself. 

It is an occasion of utmost joy and pride to the learned person to come to the realization that, a year ago this time, they were being foolish, ignorant of this or that, so silly. They shake their heads with a smile on their faces. The shake refers to the past, the smile to the present and the combination hopes to repeat itself a year from now, and forever thereafter. 

While foolishness is within all individuals and merely indicates the absence of rational and proper thought, genuine fools are those who are hardened in their condition and try to escape their better judgements. They have a deep-rooted aversion to any instance of the realization of having been foolish; a realization they could only avoid either by being born wise or by never replacing the present thought with the better thought, act and belief. The prior is impossible, the latter is consistent foolishness. So it is that their very aversion to foolishness becomes their method for becoming fools. 

Test yourself, examine your beliefs; perhaps they are still worthy of you or perhaps they no longer deserve you. Both a failing and a passing grade in this examination is desirable since you will either have rid yourself of fault or have maintained correctness. The only undesirable condition is that in which no examination takes place, for it is here that faults hide, survive and even thrive to the detriment of the best part of yourself which desires to be on its way to liberty, tranquility and happiness. 

Get into a habit, then, of rejoicing at the discovery of a fault just as much as at the preservation of a virtue. On this highest journey, each step is the justifier and enabler of the next and prior step; the left foot needs the right foot and the right, the left. Often the right is borne out of the wrong. 

Epictetus points out that when two pieces of coal are put together, one burning, the other cold, either the cold one starts to burn or the one burning goes out. So it is with minds too; are we not put out and put off by those who only smolder or have never had a fire in them at all? And are we not ignited by those who emanate heat, spark, light? 

Also, even when we experience a certain burning and are lit with ideas strong enough to transfer to others, are we not in peril if dropped into a pile of cold coals, a crowd of people, a gathering of indolent minds? It takes an exceptionally bright and hot coal to face an unlit pile and to ignite them all, let alone to have any fire left of and for itself. 

We must stay away, then, from piles of people, hordes of coal, and admit them, if at all, only one at a time; either because they stand a good chance of lighting up or because we stand a good chance of burning hotter through the company of a brightly lit mind. 

Our forms of entertainment too are great hordes of people in disguise. Do they not sneak into our homes and minds, speak to us, affect and defect us? Much of the so-called entertainment value of popular entertainment is derived from depictions of conflict, intrigue, violence, betrayal, indulgence in bodily pleasures and depend on drama overall. Notice that the more popular a form of entertainment is, the more it relies on this kind of drama and that there is no such drama without vice and that no type or degree of vice is good for us. 

Here again, our absence is required; for no one can reform another without having reformed oneself and no one can reform oneself without communing with oneself and no one can commune with oneself without foregoing association with the crowd. We are called back in due time to join society again in a state better for ourselves and better for all others. Here is your transmutation; from cold to hot, dim to bright, extinguisher to igniter, vice to virtue, merely alive to properly living.

In the renovation or conservation of a room, one does not confine the discerning gaze to any one wall but steps back to see all that needs to be done. The grander the scope, the further one must step back so that the mind may wrap itself around its own ambition. 

Similarly, all that is truly loveable, is best loved from afar. How easy it is to love humanity when viewed, rather than in the context of centers of towns and the busyness of today, in the frame of continents and millennia instead. So many glowing ideas, shining acts, a species like no other, existing despite unfathomable odds and united through time and space.  

If I look backwards with the scope of millennia rather than minutia, I look forwards with the same long sight. I cannot feel otherwise than wanting to see this amazing trajectory continued, the potential to be actualized and enlarged; the star of humanity to radiate, whether lone or among others, brimming with curiosity, honor, tolerance, kindness, intellect, mortal yet divine. 

How difficult it is to love humanity, on the other hand, in close quarters with those engaged in a quarrel, one owing another a sum of money or apology, unable or unwilling to make the transaction and the resulting feud, the preceding resentment; I want nothing to do with it.  

The greatness of the species is not apparent in every individual. But sample broadly and you will learn what there is to love about it. Learn what there is to love about it, and you will learn to incorporate all that into your own self. If, during life, you have attached yourself to these greatest ideas; If you have dedicated mind to reason, ambition to justice, pleasure to kindness, desire to honesty, mortality to immortality, finity to infinity, your best to the best, then you will stand not as a human, but as humanity; and though your body must perish, all that there ever was to love about you will live on. 

Those slight course variations early on in a journey and the vast drift they cause toward the end; simple misunderstandings and their deleterious effects on the way to the good life and the misconception that the price of wisdom is asocial behavior or even hatred of humankind stemming from an inability or unwillingness to participate in life: this is not quite right as well as disastrously wrong. 

It is true that the wise do not need friends, but to suppose that they do not want them, that they do not love calling on them and even desire their warmth, is akin to arrive at the Americas when the destination was Asia. 

Who can enjoy a proper pleasure more deeply and deservingly than the one who is adorning their heart with it rather than stuffing a hole with it; one who is not miserable in its absence and all the more grateful in its presence; one who holds their friend’s hand not out of a need but out of affection? 

This is the wise person: always content, whole and fulfilled in the present moment and in no nervous need of others, but wanting those who are also complete without others; two closed links in the chain of fellowship. “I have a friend, I will enjoy their thoughts and being; I presently do not have a friend, I will enjoy my own thoughts and being. For if I cannot enjoy my own self, I cannot enjoy another; if I cannot enjoy my own self, another won’t suffer me either.  

Although I do prefer one outcome over another, I will be happy with whatever since life handed it to me and I know that there is no other building block for happiness than the material of life. I do not need you, I want you!”. 

 What one escapes, another seeks; what is dangerous for one only furthers another and there is nothing more sought after for some and despised by others than this: time with oneself. 

It is here, in the open arena of thought, that the true nature of the spectacle of one’s mind is determined; a stage play, a bloody battle, a symphony, a competitive match. If what you see here would not even be worthy of its admission fee in the physical world, remember that the performers act out, sing and express only that which is to the taste, liking and nature of their sole patron: you 

If you are in constant avoidance of this internal stage of thought and being, you are in futile avoidance both of who you are as well as who you should be and occupy the gap of conflict between proper spaces; for the last hour of this performance is mandatory and you will have to endure the culmination of these avoidances, sins and the very nature of the person whom you have your most direct connection with: you 

The time is now to meet the cast, players, performers and to reform them once and for all so that, after the final curtain falls, you may cheer and applaud rather than boo and cuss. While it is them who are on stage and in the arena, it is you who is on trial with an omnipresent, incorruptible, most competent and unavoidable judge: you.

Those too are friends whom we will never greet and meet, whose bodies have decades and centuries ago rejoined the oblivion from which they had spawned, but who dwell in our adoration for having been not only humans but humanity. They are those who became worthy of their place in the Universe by having used their bodies to navigate their minds through the physical domain onto which they exerted the highest ideas existent in the Universe which they honored and improved thereby. 

Ideas rule the Universe; they may result in this or that tree, but the concept of a tree never dies even if the last extant tree should drop its final seed or send its concluding pollen onto depleted ground. 

So it is that such ideas as honesty, justice, temperance, piety and friendship never die because they have existed in at least one such person who has received them and taken them out of dormancy and into active practice. Humanity being the forest comprised of such individuals who see the eternal and universal plan and decide to grow into a physical tree that not only can lay root, but does lay root, that not only can sway with the wind but does indeed brave the storm and perpetuates its physical seed in order to propagate its ideal wisdom. 

Fill your mental domain with all the friends who have demonstrated their sincerity, acuity and fidelity to the highest ideas. Pick freely too, not letting continent or century seperate you from that which knows no such boundaries: kinship. Once picked, keep them always with you and your conscience will drive you to be nothing less than them, for no one sins in the presence of a friend who abhors it; not only because they fear to lose their friend, but because they fear to lose the idea, ideal and virtue of friendship.

We fear not being granted another day as much as we take that day for granted and so it is that tomorrow is both our biggest uncertainty as well as our strongest presupposition. 

There is an area in human experience in which this fear is justified. Those who are on the heels of freedom, who have discovered the door to their intellect and divinity within, but did not yet enter it, have reason to dread not waking to another day; for the prize is so near. They are sure it exists, yet they lack possession of it. And so fear gives them the urgency to make haste towards the edge of finity and to cross over into themselves. 

This is a sweet fright for it is the last angst they will feel and its elevating effect makes it right and proper. Otherwise fear is improper and misplaced since those who have not discovered that door can hardly find a reason to live while those who passed through that door can hardly find a reason to fear.

The challenger has arrived and goes by the name of present circumstance. But present circumstance knows not how to challenge eternal intellect; how to meet in the same arena: wanting to face the challenge, we descend to it and this is part of our downfall. Eternal intellect stoops down to become unexamined impulse; low enough to come within reach of the missiles of present circumstance. 

Each report made to us of incoming difficulty, misery, drudgery, poverty, severity, tragedy is yet another costume of the one and only challenger to achieve the single and same aim: to get us to count today as a loss and to hope to be able to start living tomorrow. 

Yet, this too is a bounty that the Universe bestows on us: that even the challenger is sent to us not as an enemy but as a friend; or rather, that the Universe is so bountiful that we may find it within ourselves to receive the challenger as a friend. That bequeathment of the bounty is the work of the Universe; the proper dispensation and use of it is ours. 

And the proper use of a challenge is to unveil the opportunity for advancement within it: if the challenge is overcome, we have advanced; if the challenge is failed, we have advanced towards advancement. Where is pain, where is misconception, where is conflict, where are unexamined beliefs; is it not the challenger who does us the service of pointing these out, which is something that we had not been able to do, otherwise it would have already been done?

The validity of any endeavor is determined by the desire that motivated it; for there can be no motivation for, and compliance with, an action that does not hold the promise of the fulfillment of a certain desire.  

There are those who desire desires based on their desirability to other desirers. All such comparison-based desires are hollow, shallow and futile: they bring forth a constant state of anxiety interrupted only by short moments of a sense of victory based on nothing other than the defeat of another.  

It is not about the prize but about the differentiation that the prize brings: "You and I, formerly competitors and therefore similar, now, loser and victor and therefore dissimilar." To try to become dissimilar, to achieve distinction like this, is fatal because it necessitates competition and competition turns fellows into competitors and competitors into enemies and enemies into each other. 

To fight fire with fire and to take an eye for an eye are ruinous actions practiced only between enemies. And so it is that the purpose is defeated: all those who were seeking differentiation become more similar and even identical, perfect mirror images, exact reactions to actions, equal weights on a scale, as ugly as the other, as mean as the other in a game of ever-increasing hostility and ever-decreasing humanity.  

To desire differentiation is to desire smallness also, for the Universe is singular and infinite while all that desires to be apart from it is multiple and finite. To desire similarity with infinity is to become infinite and all that is infinite is too plentiful to fight over, too beautiful to soil with the ugliness of battle; it is away, above and out of competition.  

The path that leads beyond competition is picked clean of gold but littered with sharp stones meant to prevent the enemy. Those who have survived the path without fatal cuts to their feet, have their predecessors with restraint, clemency and rationality to thank, but they are thankless and they show no such grace to their brothers, sisters and children who have no other path to walk on also. They see not the sharp stones on the path but only the gaps between them and they see no reason to clear the stones but to fill the gaps. They choose to point to stones as justifications for more violence rather than to gaps as opportunities for peace.  

To move beyond competition, to reject ugliness is the only human victory and prize worth chasing; all else consists of unjustifiable means to defeated purposes. 

Any physical existence is the vehicle of an idea; the way that it is activated, realized and practiced. All those who go, want to go first and then implement that drive; there is no implementation without conception.  

Similarly, the human body is the vehicle of the human mind. In this sense, the body is servile, but the mind has no vehicle without the body and the body has no direction without the mind; a co-dependent hierarchy. Take care then to care for your body, for it has use; but take care not to make it your primary care, for then it is not useful. 

Both the neglect of gear as well as the coddling of it is unbecoming of an athlete and there is no greater athleticism than the aerobics of the mind that leaps into and circums the Universe in timeless and universal thought; and there is no greater shame than to protect with dormancy that which should be used to avoid dormancy.

When sages point to the within as the container of all that is truly good and truly bad, they speak a Universal truth, but not necessarily a personal truth. It is akin to stating the simple fact that rock has no inherent monetary value and that it is plentiful anywhere on earth either on or below the surface. 

Within the walls of my kingdom, however, I stock it, all commerce domestically depends on it, and certain colors of rocks are prized beyond their weight. It is I, the king, who values it and makes it valuable to those who value me, my subjects. So it is that a Universal truth is kept untrue locally. 

Philosophy too is kept untrue in the locality of the minds of certain individuals and, much like the propped up monetary value of rocks which does not extend past the border of the kingdom, individual truths only reign in limited fashion and keep our economy odd and illusory. If my economy is hardly sustainable within my own walls, it is faulty; if my thoughts are similarly faulty, they are hardly sustainable.  

Once I empty my pockets of rocks, my economy is freed up to receive that which is valuable not only to a personal extent but to the Universal one; and what is valuable on the Universal basis is of the highest Good, Worth and Significance. By tearing down the walls of my kingdom, I do not diminish it, rather, I extend its reach to include all of the Universe; by letting go of my local truths, I do not lose myself, rather, I align myself with the Universe 

Philosophy is not the invention of truth but an alignment with Truth, the discardment of individual and local truths and their replacement with Universal Truth; the relinquishment of resistance to what is greater than oneself. It is the admiration of a rock not for its monetary value but for the fact that it was molten billions of years ago; and the fact that it will be molten again and that this life of yours, even the life of your entire species, is merely a blip within its own existence which in turn is a blip within the existence of existence. 

Remember also that Truth is not a fact taught in schools but Freedom learned in souls; that everything that is truly holy will visit your church, bow before your altar and pray in your direction. And that everything that aligns you with Nature is holy; that everything that is holy is natural. 

The firmer we hold on to possessions the more they take possession of us. The tight grip is not one of security but insecurity; for only those who are afraid hold on to things stronger than themselves, and all externals are stronger than oneself since they are tied to fortune which dispenses and recalls everything that has ever been given and taken.  

To be ill-prepared to let go is to be well committed slavery: “I will go wherever fortune drags me and I will be loyal to it even if it beats me, drowns me, starves me, burns me, crushes me, abuses me; for I am dependent on this master and I am nothing by myself”. 

You should be so lucky; to be nothing is to be receptive to that which has given being to fortune herself: Divinity. When has fortune killed anything that could not be reborn? When has it demolished anything that cannot be rebuilt? And when has anything ever perished that could not be thought of still?  

Fortune can kill a human, it cannot give birth to humanity; and if it shall pick us all off one by one, humanity is still possible; in the soup of some star, infinite dormant Reason will give birth to finite active reason once again. Socrates will come once more, ever-more, and take possession of infinity within finity, immortality within mortality and he will utter the same proof of inner Divinity to outer fortune: “You can kill me, but you cannot harm me”.

If you are overwhelmed by worry, fury and resentment, why do you trust that the eternal afterlife does not exist: if this life is all there is, either you believe it should be miserable or that it could not be any other way – you are resigned to painful ephemerality or meaningless oblivion.  

If you are consumed by dread, anger, and regret, why do you trust that the eternal afterlife does exist: if your existence will continue forever, either you believe that you will experience these things infinitely or that you will be stripped of most of your own self – you are resigned to endless torture or final perishment.  

If you would rid yourself of these things, as anyone who has ever been rid of them has done, you would experience either heaven on earth or heavenly earth. Those who do not find heaven on earth do not qualify for heaven as one does not qualify for honesty without truth; those who do not find meaning in life do not qualify for happiness as one does not qualify for temperance without moderation. 

It would be cruelty if it was not happening unintentionally: that our very accomplishments are diminished by the prizes we receive for them. What is wealth and fame other than the approval and reward given by the many to the few, and what else is approval and reward, for those who are ill-prepared for them, other than the diminishment of the work for which they have received these things. Nothing can be said during applause, nothing can be produced during payment and the profane business of collecting accolades takes the place of the divine busyness with the work that garnered them. 

Those who produce work in obscurity for posterity must be aware of this incoming likely detriment; a return to obscurity by way of fame, a return to poverty through wealth, a return to oblivion via the discovery of oneself by others. To prepare to receive anything divine must include the preparation of being received by profanity for it. 

Fortune has something to do with our attainment of the highest Good, since we cannot seek what we do not know exists, but to lose it is our doing entirely; for the highest Good is lost in one way only: neglect.  

Pinch yourself; wake again and again to the reality of being a member of a species that is capable of being the family and species of any member that honors the idea of honor, is true to the idea of truth, just to the idea of justice. These ideas are more real than reality itself, or they are the first real things, since they exist even where and when nothing else exists.  

Can I point to a physical location in the universe where truth is not possible, where justice is inconceivable, and if I fail to do so, can I point to a reason why they cannot exist within me here today? Am I really the only point in the universe in which these things are impossible? If I am perturbed by the absurdity of my justifications for the lack of justice within me, I should make a start at once to find true abundance; that which is timeless and universal, and I will have it; for in the realm of ideas, starting is finishing, trying is achieving and wanting is having.

The height of human dignity is civil service, which is exercised in two distinct but related realms of existence, the physical and the spiritual. 

Those who take care of us with their civil service in the physical realm see to our needs of drinkable water, passable roads, protection from those who are disobedient to the law and their own human dignity.  

This is crucial but not enough, for even though a physical road enables travel to a physical destination, physical travel is only right and proper if it is undertaken to make progress in the spiritual realm: to say that one spiritually communed with God solely because they physically visited a church is blasphemy. 

More importantly than the maintenance of physical roads in the physical realm is the maintenance of the idea of progress in the spiritual realm. For we have repeatedly lost, for hundreds of years at a time, not the ancient Greek statues themselves but the knowledge and skill of producing them. In the spiritual realm, we need those civil servants who remind us of the proper use of roads, of travel and of deliverance. 

If then the height of human dignity is civil service and the height of civil service is spiritual civil service, the foundation which all of this rests on is the care and attention that the civil servant gives to themself. 

If the one who clears the roads and the one who frees the sculpture of the excess marble that surrounded it does not take care of themself, becomes sick bodily or disillusioned spiritually, they cease rendering their services and we forget their knowledge.  

Also, did they not attain this knowledge and their spiritual inspiration for themselves, by themselves. No one has ever become just for someone else, no one has ever become honest to benefit another. Selflessness comes from true selfishness and what benefits society is what is to the benefit of every individual that it consists of. 

The words of the wisely dying on the unwisely living: 

As things are, they would rather hold themselves in contempt than by the hand; they choose meeting the expectations of others over meeting with their own approval and their preferences lead them to what they thereby deserve: a life of misery. But nothing immiserates them other than misery; nothing constrains them other than constraint; nothing worries them other than worry; nothing gives them grief other than grief; and grief, misery, worry and constraint have no existence without their accomplice who is the person preferring them by perceiving them as a matter of course and of resentment. 

Is it really bad for one and good for the other that rains fall on both, or is it right for all. All is right which they could have neither caused nor prevented and all that is right is necessary and all that is necessary is important and nothing that is important, necessary and right could be against their nature. All that prevents them preserves them also; all that constrains them guides them also and nothing that preserves and guides should be viewed as prevention or constraint. 

How often have they pleaded with the Universe to give them that which it did not go on to grant them and how often have they come back to it with gratitude for going against their wishes? They must repent from wishing; for they did not know, do not know, will not know what is best for them until it is given to them and surely, the Universe did not give them this mind as a tool for resentment; surely, it did not give them this life as an object of resentment; surely, it is not the world that fails them but their worldview.

Expecting to find joy without looking is futile. Expecting to find joy and not finding it is frustrating. All who experience frustration or futility are looking for joy in the wrong place, otherwise they would find joy instead of futility or frustration, and all who look for joy in the wrong place, look for it outside of themselves. 

Has anyone ever found the qualities of a piece of gold outside of itself?  

“It is pure, bright, resistant to corrosion”.  

Was Emerson not all of these things? And were these things not intrinsic to his being? And was he not joyous; joyous because he made himself golden, golden because he made himself joyous? 

We can be golden because we can be dirty; we can be joyous because we can be frustrated. It is our choice that enables us or that dooms us. Since choice is with the chooser, to choose to look away from choice is to choose to look away from oneself and those who cannot even stand (to look at) themselves, shall fail to find joy.

The most elastic object on earth has proven to be the human mind; nothing else can adapt to all circumstances by stretching to their circumferences. You have noticed that there are those pricked by death who seem to have been pricked by a splinter; it’s hardly anything to them. 

You have noticed too that there are those who are pricked by a splinter who seem to have been pricked by death; it is everything to them. They are identical in chemical makeup but differ in spiritual disposition: one stretches into acceptance, the other contracts into resentment. 

Demonstration: imagine one of your current worries actualized and feel the resulting resentful contraction. Now add to this imagination the knowledge that you will meet it with a clear conscience and feel the expansion; how much more bearable it has become.  

To face death, exile, loss with the knowledge of having done nothing wrong and that to do no wrong is totally up to us; this is why they preach virtue: there is not a single thing that is better without it.

What hold people back are not their particular faults but the general inability of putting faults into service. Shyness may prevent the uttering of many right words, but it is also a muzzle for rashness and foolishness.  

Listening is reformation forced on oneself, speaking is reformation forced on others. To reform, one must have listened; to speak, one must have been reformed and who could be better candidates for reformation than the shy: they are intent on listening and reluctant to speak. 

Shyness accepted in this way is the scalpel of its dissection into two parts: underconfidence and confusion. Once divided, they are mastered. The mastery of underconfidence is humbleness; the mastery of confusion is skepticism and both are integral to wisdom. For if those who shall humble themselves shall be exalted, those who will question themselves will be freed. 

Faults are our apprenticeship years, wisdom our years of mastery; and we must achieve graduation via exaltation: pride to humility, anger to clemency, envy to goodwill, resentment to joy, fear to courage, fault to wisdom, vice to virtue. 

In general terms, the path towards freedom is opened up not by the solution of contradictions, but by the dissolution of the mind that sees contradictions. In particular terms, the knowledge of oneself is attained not by becoming more familiar, but by becoming increasingly unfamiliar with oneself. 

Is it not true that during the renovation of a room, the more is fixed, the less familiar it becomes? And to evict the angry fool, the envious haggard, the resentful maniac is crucial to the initial surveyance and eventual renovation of one’s own room:  

“You made promises and I harbored you. You insinuated that I would have to be desirous in order to receive, furious in order to accomplish and begrudge in order to revenge. We have dined and schemed, slept and thrashed, bathed and maligned together and you have made yourself familiar to me.  

I see the state of the room of which you have been tenants. You have brought nothing but destruction; I do not wish to know you, but to forget you, to become unfamiliar and to not even recognize you. For only the familiar recognize each other and I am no longer one of you. You have upset my neighbors and you have convinced me of my neighbors’ intolerance and avarice; you have made me stomp and thump; you have made me noisy and feisty; you have turned my home into a camp and the world into a battleground. I will lay down the weapon that you handed to me; I will use it no longer, neither against my neighbor nor for your eviction. Rather, I will make this room unbearable to you: I will make it silent and peaceful, sparse and dignified, clean and bright. 

Whoever else is concealed in their filth will be thrown out together with it. There will be no more corners, recesses or abrasions in this room; nothing for pride to stick to, for jealousy to tuck in, for rage to grind on. I will no longer allow countrymen, kinsmen or bogeymen entrance, for every time they enter, too small a patriotism, too large a pride and too deep a fear enters with them. This room is not exclusive to me, for I know not who I am, it is more so to the exclusion of those who I am not, for I know now who they are.” 

Constantly remind yourself how small and fleeting your troubles are and how grand and eternal the ability to do so is. What demonstrates better that the world is perception and that it is you who perceives the world; that you rule the world.  

Only make sure to never make planet Earth your world, for once you decide to rule soil and water, you will only create mud. Instead, occupy yourself with fertility and hydration since soil and water are the physical manifestations of those ideal concepts. Think to what end there should be soil and water, fertility and hydration, and serve that end.  

What can you do to rid yourself of an infertile mind and the drought that you have felt all this time; the deep thirst that no water can quench. Go after every possible solution; experiment, examine and exalt the highest ideas to find your everlasting peace in all that is Universal, Eternal and of benefit to the highest part of your being and call this mode of living philosophy. 

The purest innocence and the brightest wisdom is in ignorance. Those who choose good over bad are heroes; those who see no other option than good are sages. We must learn to remember to forget; each time we encounter one of our sins, to turn away from it and then to forget it. This wise ignorance resembles the ignorant wisdom of children and animals: those who did not choose their innocence and are unaware of it.  

Even those who walk make no progress if they are in deep rumination on superficial concerns; for all their wisdom, they see that they are running, but not that they are running in circles. For all their ignorance, animals do not run in circles, because they do not know how to run in circles unawares.   

The shriek of a hawk ripped through the curtain of thought and thus it spoke without knowing it spake; thus it corrected the sinner without knowing of sin:  

• “Imminence and importance and it is dark already. I rip to feed and I feed to rip. My needs are unrelenting; I am tending to a life that is always in pending. I seek what I need and I feel it only when I bleed. It is you who can read so heed what I spelled out to you in deed.”  

• “I do not walk, but churn. I thicken that which repulses me, I worsen that which I mustn't be. Clearly, pain is perpetual but sin is habitual; it is sinful to perpetuate but merely painful to habituate. Rather pain than sin, rather now than then, here than when.”

Our biggest fear is to be a deviant and deviating even from the sinful ways of others has become a terror.  

• “What is it that prevents you to come over to virtue?” 

• “Come over to virtue, I? when you have sinned in the past and he and she are still sinning and yet others will sin tomorrow and all the days of our lives?” 

We have put likeness to others above liking our own self and we have traded the hard exalting climb of friendship for the easy gourmandizing descent of enemyship; for only enemies let vices land and flourish on each other, not realizing that the encouragement of a sin is a sin and another sin since it ruins oneself while aiming to ruin another. So it is that all enemies have this in common: they are sinners and are like each other. And all friends have this in common: they are deviants and unlike sinners. 

Us, who have never loved anyone more than the one who showed us our folly, no wonder we do not yet love ourselves: we aim to keep others like ourselves and ourselves like others.

All that is asked of us is to accept reality, for all else is delusion, and all that is not delusion is what is occurring presently and what is occurring presently is change, always, and change is necessary by the very fact that it occurs and all that is necessary is acceptable. 

The full bowl changes into an empty one and our hunger changes into satiety; and it is shameful to look at the bowl instead of the incoming spoon, for the mouth only accepts one bite at a time. To look at the bowlful is to take the spoonful for granted, but how do we know? 

To have eaten one bite at a time, with attention on the spoon and not the bowl, is to have conducted the meal properly. To have lived with one’s attention on the present moment rather than past regrets or future worries is to have conducted a life properly. Such a life is satiety and lets go of the dishes willingly.  

We have a silver spoon in our mouths even though the Universe never owed it to us; we awoke to yet another day even though life never owed it to us.

The abuser finds it easier to abuse others for they find it harder to love an abuser such as themself and they punish themself by giving abuse to others and withholding love from themself. It is a strange act of selflessness: to deprive oneself of love and to ensure becoming even less worthy of it by dispensing the opposite of it to the innocent or the unrelated. 

The lover finds it easier to love for they find it impossible to abuse; not for the injury that it would cause others but because of the injury it would cause themself; the injury of becoming an abuser. It is a strange act of selfishness: to repent from abusing others in order to qualify for love oneself. 

This too is one of the faux contradictions of philosophy that must be overcome in order to overcome.

To assume that happiness is located in the future is to be convinced that the pencil will be found in the other room, and no amount of looking at the desk will reveal it sitting next to the notebook. 

To believe that happiness will take a long time to be achieved is to believe that it takes a whole notebook to spell “happiness”, and pages will run out before delusion; drowning the one word that initiated the writing. 

To fear that happiness is too complex to be attained is to fear basic rules of language: when turning “happy” into “happiness”, the “Y” must be removed and replaced with “I” and then the “I” must be removed and replaced with nothing.

What comes out of the mouths of our chosen few are tired words gliding on used air and we are idolators for inhaling this pollution by others when we could take in fresh air and exhale truth ourselves. These sounds have been wafting out of them since antiquity: “eloquence is me, originality is me, capacity is me, vision is me; to be dazzled by it is you, to cite it is you, to be limited is you, to be blind is you.” 

We are in danger of having spent all our lives in idolatry if we do not commit to what we have always known: “I am equal in capacity to Capacity, in intellect to Intellect, in vision to Vision. An idol has no more God in it than I do, there is as much Idea in the expression of it as there is in me and any well-formed expression of an idea is common property; even if it comes from me, it is not only mine, even if it comes from you, it is not only thine. I will forget memorization and I will become accustomed to familiarization. One does not memorize one’s own name; one simply knows it!”

Inconsistency is conflict, conflict is anger, anger is insanity. Consistency is harmony, harmony is peace, peace is happiness. But ours is consistency that ruins all consistency: the consistency in word and deed. 

I gave you a word: friend. I gave you a deed: friendship. But you have let yourself down since then; you have become unfriendly and you sank friendship. Shall I go down with it, shall I die on this hill of consistency called "loyalty”? 

My service is not to a particular citizen, but to civilization; not to a particular friend, but to friendship. So my consistency should not be in word and deed but in effort: a loyalty to the effort of exchanging what I have known to be true with what I have come to know to be truer.  

Truth over tradition, clarity over custom, examination over convention. I wish my consistency to gratify not you and me, but that which makes me worthy of you if you are worthy of Friendship.

The greatest good is universal. This is why swindlers have invented rarity; their goods are decaying into worthlessness; whence they came from. 

The truest truth is timeless. This is why charlatans call for urgency; their truths are quickly slipping into irrelevance; thence they came from. 

The friendliest friendship is impersonal. This is why the lonely have enemies; their friendship is being consumed by hate of the unknown, hence it came from.

Nature has proportioned and delimited everything that happens to us to be either severe in duration or severe in intensity, never both. 

Below average intelligence is severe in duration, but is easily handled. It is us who make it severe in intensity by berating ourselves to be worthless fools. Truth is, the slow who accept their lack and take their time do much better than the fast who rush; and the fast always rush for they think themselves capable. This is how those with lower intelligence can become abundant in the very thing that they lacked: understanding. And how those with higher intelligence can become abundant in the very thing that negates their skills: pride. 

Death is severe in intensity, but the process is quick. It is us who make it severe in duration too by fearing it all our lives. Truth is, to learn how to die well is to learn how to live well. All that is immortal is infused into mortality; all those who think timeless ideas, think them within time and all those who see universal truths, see them from the patch that they stand on. We cannot perceive without contrast: dark and light, silence and sound, bad and good, health and illness, scarcity and abundance, wisdom and slavery, death and life. 

To feel severity in duration as well as in intensity is to carry one too many things, but it is never too late to let go because Nature’s laws are immediate also: no one has ever shed something that they should not have carried and did not become lighter; instantaneously.

Reason; I have been seeing you all my life, but in servility to those who thought it best to reach unreasoned ends with reasoned means. They accounted systematically, profited maximally, invested astutely and reaped again methodically. They called their wishes good and wished for goods; and you grant all wishes, for who should reach for something with reason and be denied its grasp? They have reached for thrilling greed and noxious pleasure; for crushing wealth and crippling honors; and they were served a life of blight as well as the further misery of thinking that these things were happening against their wishes. 

I see now that it is not you in servility but those who put themselves in the servile position of being your master. If they treated the work of life as reasonably as they treated their work of bread, they would see that it is not those who use reason but those who obey it who get what they want because they want what they get; and one can never not get what one wants if one wants what one gets.

Revolutions are the burstings of thresholds of evolutions. There has been an accumulation of change that can no longer be contained by the current order. The revolution is welcomed only if there has been such a long and steady cementation of fundament. This work is silent, modest and involves no rehearsed gesticulations and articulations; not even a raised voice. 

All revolutions led by the arousing flag and the rhythmic movement of passions go against the feeling of those involved, are feeble yet violent, earth-shattering yet short-lasting while the grandest, most worthwhile and just revolutions are those which can neither be aroused nor silenced: the revolutions of the individual within the individual.

Nature has yet not seen a reason to give permanence to instance. And so the wish of any one human to live forever, to become immortal, is the wish of one instance to become permanence of which it is already an instance of. 

There is no analogy to this: we do not care where our fingernails go, and so does nature not care where we go. But our fingernails are not an instance of ourselves, only a part. Whereas humans are not a part of permanence, they are an instance of it; they are not capable of only partial reason, love, justice and all the other permanent ideas that pervade the all; they contain them fully in the instance of their human lives.  

As no instance of immortality could dissolve in mortality, as no instance of love could ever be angered by hate and as no instance of reason could ever be deluded by unawareness, no human life can be made minuscule by the brevity of its existence when that brevity spans the entirety of entirety.

Remember that manners of speech as well as gesticulation, dress and so forth, are mostly deliberate choices to signal to others certain messages. If speech and dress are labored, pompous and flamboyant, the person lacks something within which they aim to compensate for without. Yourself too, even if you are of modest dress, speech and walk, are not immune to this. Whenever your speech quickens it is because you are in fear of losing the attention of whom you are talking to, and you try to compensate by speed. Know that either what you are saying is not interesting, you are not telling it in a proper way, or the person does not value what you have to say to begin with. 

Make your thoughts interesting and the speech will follow; put your mind at ease and your gesticulation will assume an unaffected style; value your own opinion of yourself and pomp will fall off of you. All should be simple, at ease, not rushed. Assume these characteristics of the Universe.

Only in our crimes or charities do we act like a deed not seen is a deed not done. But we cannot steal and expect not to become poorer; we cannot give and expect not to become richer. Has anyone ever remained hungry because no one saw them eat? Has anyone ever remained clean because no one saw them soil themselves? The body keeps the score of the body but the mind keeps the score of the Universe. Not a movement of ours escapes our mind and so not a movement of ours escapes the Universe which dispenses justice instantaneously: “In the instance in which you gave into hate, you became hateful; you gave into envy and you became envious; you have sinned and so you are soiled”. How else could it be, how else should it be? 

Being endowed with such a mind, we carry the entire scale of the Universe with us. How can we ever hope to escape this divinity within us and why would we ever wish to escape it? Our highest worth is weighed by this highest scale and our highest worth is our highest thought, not our least detected crime or our most profitable charity. How else could it be, how else should it be?

If we are not yet ready to see that there is no loss or gain other than all that we can bestow on ourselves and deprive of ourselves, then we should at least fear gain as much as loss; for it is equally perilous. 

We gain the adoration of many and we lose self-respect because we start dancing to their claps; we gain wealth and we lose our freedom because we cannot live without it anymore. In gain we are not gainly but excessive, in loss we are not humble but humiliated. 

To be exalted or deprecated by one’s means is deprecating, whereas to be exalted or deprecated by one’s ends is exalting; for our means are on loan to us when they are ours and on loan to others when they are not ours, whereas our ends can be our own if only we sought profit and deficit in our ends rather than our means, in our intentions rather than in their outcomes; if we knew of good or bad only within rather than without.

Observe how the very things that keep us in check can keep us down too. That which is magnificent is made shy by the gaze of those who strive for it; it is both magnificent as well as embarrassed precisely because it has intact shame. What we must learn is to say: “you destroy yourself when you are ashamed of the magnificence that your sense of shame gives you”.  

We must give in here but press on there. Always giving in is the deed of the honorable but feeble; always pressing on is the deed of the strong but dishonorable. Once we can learn to discern when it is appropriate to give strength to the sense in our sense of shame and give pause to the shame in our sense of shame, we will stop living in hiding and step into the open court of life where those who see us look neither up or down to us but look at us as a demonstrator of the virtues of balance and constancy.  

It is nothing other than the work of virtues which turns our sense of shame into a benefit; and it is nothing other than the lack of them which turns our magnificence into shame.

They who differ do not differ in potentiality, for there is no differentiation there, hence they differ in actuality by the degree of their vision that they obscure with their own hands; merely looking out of a small slot to focus their attention on wealth and fame and power, and indeed, they receive that which they deem themselves worthy of: greed is given to those who are hungry for wealth; vanity to those hungry for fame; hubris to those hungry for power. 

It is the divine characteristic of the highest Good to put us all on even ground and to let those trip who hold their heads askew. They may not find the horizon straight, the world just, and beauty unspoiled until they cease attempting to level the world and commence rectifying themselves. 

The level-headed attempt to fix nothing; to build plumb and square is their only activity. All else will fall, everything built in wack will be rebuilt taking note and measure from that which has stood and still intends to stand. Thereby those askew will have their opportunity to center their spirits, square their minds and rejoice: “I see now that necessity is felicity, for all that must be is real and all that is real is reality, and that I add the dye of resentment, the poison of anger, the dung of revenge into all that happens, thereby spoiling it for my own self. Plumbness, levelness and straightness cannot be adjusted, only aligned with; reality cannot be changed, only accepted. And I have all I need to draw a straight line; I have all I need to love what has become mine, either by acquisition or by reception.”

Those who grubble for means are looking at the hands of others and if they see them holding a thing they say: “what do you want for it?” “You may please me and I may let you hold it; you might displease me and I might beat you with it. I will exalt you or deject you and I will determine your ends”. “Woe to me, I haven’t got the means. This is my struggle and my misery. If I had only the means, I would know what to do with them.” 

Yet, they do not wish their struggles to end but an end to their struggles, a reason for their fighting, and even if the end is achieved, new ends are promptly invented. Peace is turmoil to them, silence is deafening, and calm is agitating. They have run out of ends and the prize has become their punishment. 

Have you not seen those who make peace their end, achieving it instantaneously; those who put love first, gaining it fully? For love is not an addition but a subtraction of hate; peace is not victory over an enemy but the rejection of enemyship. And to those who are dedicated to proper ends, all good is added and all else is subtracted and then multiplied into estrangement from all toil and struggle and they are called on by all of us in all our ecstatic or forlorn hours for their highest counsel: “Put the end first and all means will come to you.” 

That mere readable symbols, simple listenable sounds, can take from the source its highest thought, compress and compact and unfold it again into the eye or ear and mind of those who stand in reading and hearing distance, is the most astonishing of happenings as well as the most human of activities. What greater good for the ether to transmit in ray and wave than this perpetual human need and privilege, and what better condition for writing fingers, hearing ears and seeing eyes than to vibrate at a tune uniquely capable of tranquilizing all of our demons.  

For as I write or read or listen, I go out of myself and I know not where I am, when I am and who I am and it is this unawareness that is productive more than the automatic toil of every day and restful more than the dark blank of every night. But tranquilization is only the step between tragedy and tranquility, and while the demons sleep, I know I must reach beyond the eye and the ear to the Mind of the mind, the Intellect of intellect which not only these words but the entire readable and audible realm is a symbol of, the signifier of the signified, and that my eternal resting place is not the ever-churning earth but the forever-steadiness of universal thought which came to me in parts by word, image and song and which Unity has unified within me and me within it.

Feared are those who possess power as well as are possessed by power, who possess wealth and are possessed by wealth, and to be possessed is to fear since there is nothing scarier than slavery, not of chains and shackles, but of needs and desires.  

Indeed, do we not fear those most who fear most (are irritable, violent and malignant which are all futile reactions to fear and misery), and love most those who love most? For a state of love is incompatible with the condition of fear because, while fear is slavery, love is freedom and since no one who is possessed can be free, love is not possible for the feared and fearful; and to those who love and are loved, fear is impossible since whether they possess power and wealth or not, they are not possessed by them. 

Simply: those who are possessed by their possessions are possessed by fear and resemble agonous demons which are feared; those who gave the deed of ownership over to love and borrow, lease and rent their possessions from love as love grants and requires, resemble serene deities and are loved.

The further your works go out of you, the more effortful and affected and grand they must become to accomplish any goal. A spec in your eye may cover not only the whole sun but all of the sky and the world and all of your faults, all that you see ever, but to do this for someone else as well, you need two specs; to do this for a village, you need a mountain; to do this for a nation you need entire mountain ranges to erupt in noxious, thick clouds that cover the sky and kill the earth. This is the insurmountable toil of us who work for others when we could just put a spec in our own eye, or rather, remove it.  

And why not then see if one cannot get another to hold open their lids, to be still and to undergo a temporary and beneficial burning of sight and perception; and why not leave those to their thrashing and convulsing who think of such movement as regular and necessary and take no color from them. If each of us acted thusly, who could even attempt to obscure our vision or sour our minds without benefiting us in their showcasing of the perils of an excruciating life of pain and our benefiting them in our showcasing of the pearls of an instantiating life of freedom? 

The brevity of human life underlines the magnificence of the human mind. Even the longest life, a blip of time, further shortened by the infirmity of the waxing earlier years, the decrescent later years, in between those, the near constant service to the body and the gear of life: here for sleep, there for nourishment, and for cleaning again already. 

The mind, then, lives on scraps, on crumbs of bread and drops of rain. Half an hour a day, not in concern of him or her, friend or foe: “what is courage, what is justice and how to get ahead without leaving tears in my stead?” This is its breaking fast or evening spread, and all health comes from this nourishment. 

So it is that devout mortality embodied in feeble existence can peer into the universal Mind that constitutes and constantly recycles all there is, and that these drops and crumbs of the Universe can feed those who enable themselves to live in its image: with might, simplicity, courage, justice, temperance, constancy, prudence, with eternal vision, incorruptible, timeless grace, equal to the best conduct within the highest Intellect; if not in scope and magnitude, then at least in intent, which the Universe recognizes as the deed itself.  

It resounds only to those who listen for whispers even within the noisy means of their daily bread: “dost not feed the crumbs of thy other bread to the birds or the bird-minded; are thou not endowed with intellect that can feed on them and then prepare a feast for the world?”

IThere has been many an escape made through walls of brick and mortar with spoon and determination, stemming from simple realization: that even the smallest act can overcome the most daunting fact if it can find a way to renew itself. The wall is mighty and strong, but it is finished; it does not act and it does not become tired; it does not rest and it does not become rejuvenated. And that which is harder, can wear away which is grander, be it galvanized steel on baked brick or consolidated virtue on the hardened menace of the crowd. 

"Love is strong as death and hard as hell”, but really, it is miraculously stronger than vehemence and harder than solidity. This is the only miracle that engenders all others and is this not observed daily?  

Do we not see love rejuvenating and rejoicing in stillness every day, while anger is only able to stoke its flames by burning its favorite furniture and, with nothing else left to sacrifice, choking on its own cold ashes?  

And while anger can do nothing with its own ruins, is it not love that scoops up its ashes and finds use for them too by mixing them into depleted soil and bringing forth the queendom of tulips, transforming even that which started and ended with mortal anger into infinite and rejuvenating life?

When we have a choice, it is our duty to be so picky as if the whole world owes us whatever we prefer most; if we do not have the choice, it is our privilege to submit immediately, as if we owe the world everything we have ever received, which we indeed do.  

To accept, to act indifferently towards indifferent things, is in no way to act randomly or to have no preferences; to the contrary, each and everything should be ranked by how conducive it is to all of those things that are truly good or bad and the best of them should be attached to oneself, but only loosely. While they are there, we make use of them, as the tools and resources that they are, to serve the highest Good. When they do fall away, they mustn’t tear off a part of us but come off like a scab that has served its purpose.  

In everything, if we make it our aim to reach the fortress most suitable to defend against the vices, we will reach it; for even if we are stopped on the way, we will be able to say: I have arrived never the less.

“Whom do thee oppose! and heap circumstance and encumbrance, disagreement and denial, refutation and disparagement upon? No avail! I have deleted the boundaries of time and place: I have kinship everywhere and everywhen, and I can commune with a friend who never met me, whom I shall never meet! I have erased the mandate on originality and exclusivity of ideas: every thought worthy of its receiver, every receiver worthy of the thought, is each other’s, it is common property. 

Nothing beautiful pales upon your calling it ugly, nothing ugly flourishes upon you calling it beautiful. We shall refute each other’s judgements on beauty, but that there is beauty at all, who defies acceptance of it? You and I shall disagree on the sense impressions, but that we perceive at all, who dares to deny it? 

Here it is that I sense that ultimate Authority; behind the visible there is the invisible and behind the invisible, there is the inconceivable. When I am left a poem on my desk, I shall hold the note to be the visible, it’s author the invisible, and the inconceivable to be the impetus that motivated this author. As you squabble on choice of paper, grammar and penmanship, I am in communion with the mere possibility, the immense reality, of the invisible that it points to; and I am freed of squabble and argument, agreeance and disagreeance, permission and possession, allowances and prohibitions.  

In the name of that ultimate Authority, I will not ask for permission to speak freely; it has joined the rank of all other things that we do not even think to ask for, like breathing and seeing, and now too that joy of feeling the immutable connection of all who share in the timeless and universal inheritance of the tradition of thought that has been our birthright before even the first inheritors became worthy of this estate, of this faith of skull to skull and chest to chest, with no intermediary, the citizenry of universality, the parliament of eternity.” This shall suffice as the answer to: “where do thee gain your courage from!” 

None of us can be courageous until we do lionhearted acts not out of bravery but out of a chosen lack of choice to do otherwise. Does a donkey kick wolves that intend to feed on her child out of courage or out of compulsion to preserve what is greatest to her? Say it is instinct, that it is simply automatic boldness, and I will agree: it is the command of God and she is merely obeying it; unable to do otherwise. And if we can become as obedient as her, not by ignorance, but by the use of our reason, we shall finally take our place as the sons of God; the inheritance that we have been on about all this time.

In the daily unconscious exchange of time for money and money for food and food for waste, which too many call employment, there is no expression of productivity, profitability or even humanity; all are gears and springs of a machine that runs in maintenance of itself, not of its service. The machine must drive a drill or a pump, and not run to consume fuel, although it will wear out regardless to what end it runs, and life runs out regardless to what end it has been lived. 

That life, then, should make use of itself and come home bearing gifts, results and ideas. The most vigorous anima is the one that serves reason; and the most exalted reason is the one that serves the highest Good. Do not do any work that is not, or does not directly contribute to, the work of life: you have toiled for eight hours today, yet in the work of life, you have yet to clock in. 

The anima, through which we receive the rays of the sun which bleaches our curtains with its perpetual scans, records the passage of time; each rotation a day, each orbit a year. But the mind perceives time via reason, as the distance between two ideas. If it perceives none, it sits in a crumbling room in which no events take place and the only measure of time is the debris that regularly falls on its vertex; reminders of pain, folly and misery. So do make unhurried haste, for cracks have already appeared.

Do not brush this distinction off lightly and consider it deliberately; in it lies your deification: to fear nothing for the lack of things to fear is the crown of the creator; to fear nothing in spite of the abundance of fearsome things is the coronation of the created. 

“I have no memory of coming to be, of a violent tearing from oblivion into existence; similarly, I will have no memory of cessation, of being ripped from life and being thrown back whence I came from. This is the nature of Nature: as hard as necessary, as gentle as possible.” 

In this you even surpass your creator, or rather you supply the creator with creation and partake in the Universe which you thereby dignify and ennoble to all of your kin. For the Universe cannot ennoble itself directly, it would need choice for that: somethings that it prefers and others that it disprefers. But nothing is unpreferred to it, otherwise it would not have created it, and so it has no choice. In its ultimate superiority there is this weakness which only its creation can remedy with its own weakness of constant choosing: to detest or to accept.  

So it is that the strength of weakness can remedy the weakness of strength, and it is this mutual honoring which is the grace of the Universe; it is the fusion that unifies creation as one whole and it fuses anew with each individual’s choosing of grace over fear and subsequent entrance into the indivisible.  

This is not a changing but a sort of reckoning: for the words “individual” and “indivisible” are in fact synonyms, and therefore we do not choose to move form individuality into indivisibility; we only take down the veil that was between the father and the son.  

The other choice would be to continue the practice of children, to cry out at the weakness of oneself and to decry the necessary harshness of growth:  

“I hate you, and never have I asked to be born, I am here against my will!”

The surest sign of Grace in the Universe? It is this: that there cannot come to mind a single advantage that in its tow does not bring at least one disadvantage, and, that disadvantage also is seen nowhere to exist without its counterpart. This unbroken succession of advantage using disadvantage as its pommel horse began when the Universe breathed on the first coal of action and not a single event has been ignited since that is not disadvantagingly advantageous.  

For which death has not yielded to life, and which life has in turn not yielded to death, and which death has ever not been the precursor and necessity for the rejuvenation of life? Even the disadvantageous fear of death has the advantageous love of life in it; otherwise what is there to fear? And if no love for life is left, there neither remains fear of death.  

If I am ashamed, even for the entire rest of my life, I am irreproachable proof, I am undeniable demonstration of my nature from which I have fallen away:  Justice (to do what is right, come what may). 

If I am tormented, even from birth to death, I am impeccable testimony, I am unmovable evidence of the state that is perhaps not possible for me currently but always for humanity generally: happiness (the joy of life which cannot come about without virtue but can be made unavailable by conditions of life). 

Lo! If I am granted respite from shame and torment, even if for only a moment in all my life, and I use it to turn the other cheek - I shame or torment no one - then I am not only proof, demonstration, testimony and evidence of, but I am Grace itself; for I have taken active part in creation: I have made impenitence from penitence, acceptance from ignorance, forgiveness from resentment, action from complacency, joy from apathy, awareness from nightmare, meaning from oblivion, life from existence, advantage from disadvantage. 

This is what is meant by “doing God’s work”: to solve oneself from disadvantage. 

Hardly imaginable that there should be something sounder than the deafening silence of a well-ordered mind; one which drowns out all tumults outside of itself and has placed everything displacing in itself, out of itself. 

But cheer it retains; it rejoices at joy, sings at song, wells at crescendos and fills its chambers with echos of poetry, inhalations of exaltation, so as to air the rooms when staleness approaches, to turn over the pillows and lay on their cool side again, and the kind of breeze that upon its detection triggers the deepest inhalation of the day with closed eyes, the fresh surface that drains all heat and bother from the scalp, is a welcome and fair pleasure. 

So very clearly then: the constancy of the soul of the sage is not to be in one state always, but to always be in the state that it wishes – now clearing its desk in order to grapple with its proper work; now leaving it covered in books with leaves still settling, pens rolling, journals wet, leaving behind not a mess but a stage of performance, a kitchen still hot, to enjoy the meal with the company that inspired the appetite to cook and to clean later. 

To do well in noise is to recognize the existence of creation, it is noise that is the sign and proof of liveliness; to do well in silence is the recognition of the creator, in the absence of all else there is the mind, the seed and fruit of the Intellect. Shun either creator or creation and there will be a great upset in rest and a vague numbness in activity. Learn to tolerate both and what can you not endure; learn to love both and what virtue will you not have learned?

Are these not the stumbling blocks that appear in any proximity to wisdom and which make us despair at it altogether for the unattainability of it: that the cost of ridding oneself of anger, fear, anxiety, resentment and regret is the extinction of all feeling, and that in order not to suffer any longer one must altogether become expressionless, unfeeling and bare; that one must give up love along with hate; that the true sage fears no fright, has no annoyance at irksomeness and is never dismayed by distress and that, as long as we have any such moments, we are worlds away from wisdom? 

But the love of wisdom is not the suppression of feeling but the simple refusal to carry it farther than the body and its reflexes demands. Notice that we have no resentments which we did not pick up as a challenge and nurtured into obligation and from obligation into resentment; that we nurtured the impersonal indifference of another into personal contradiction and from that into a narrative of unjust persecution; that we nurtured solitude into to loneliness and loneliness into despair, disillusionment into dejection and dejection into forsakenness, a mistake into shame and shame into condemnation,  rejection into anger and anger into vengeance; and so it is that we are unforgiving and unforgiven: our misery is homegrown from seeds we gather and build up ourselves. 

“But I found these seeds in the world, and I am of the world, and so I am impacted by them accordingly.” 

Sight is blind, hearing is deaf, touch is numb and taste is bland without that which makes sense of sense impressions. If sense is a mere drudge to the senses or is asleep, then they will come to make sense the way that even the silliest of them make sense to a sleepwalker; for the more we tell him that someone has stolen his toys, the more agony he will feel, forgetting that he is forty two years of age and that he has no toys and no interest in them. Once awake, and if presented with the same detriment, he will say: 

“Nonsense, I have let go of that long ago!”

Justice strikes with whichever hand and in whatever century and continent is available to it. It may use my hand now, perhaps yours in eighty years and has used yet another’s eighty thousand orbits prior.  

Humanity is a single action, carried out by successive individuals; changing shape infinitely and effortlessly, but never its intent. I lay down and you rise up, and we all advance towards our destination in macroscope, while each and every arisal is its own arrival in microscope; a part of humanity's journey, as well as the full journey of a human; furtherance as well as finality. 

Look at science to tell you how a species rises, but not to tell you why it rises and why it should continue to do so. It is not so that you too may procreate and defecate, but so that you may substantiate and perpetuate all that which will make you, or equal you to, the greatest species that could possibly  
ever hope to exist, ever hoped to exist. 

Specimen! you are the instance of an infinite force: the almighty idea and tendency which many call God, Awareness, Being, Intellect, Reality, Absolute. Call it what you may; it is that which, if lacked, turns infinity into individuality, individuality into anima, anima into thing, thing into nothing.  

When nothing is given everything, it has the opportunity to activate and embody the timeless and the universal. That very opportunity surely has many names, but only one is known to us presently: humanity.

It is a harsh thing to say that one does not deserve pleasure, desire, ecstasy, although it is true; for those who wish them for themselves are wishing for the beginning of misery: they take the promises of virtue and try to extract them from vices. So it comes to be that the joy of life is sought in the pleasure of the body, that the transcendence of thought is sought in the tranquilization of the mind, and the liberation of the soul in the transmutation of it in an afterlife. Truly, then, who deserves to be lead astray? 

The organization of tranquilizing cocktails, of transmuting ceremonies and of summoning magical forces are complicated procedures, since it is through complication that incompetence has any chance of becoming authority; but truth is that truth is simple and that all complication attached to it is viciously exclusive, ferociously misleading and vehemently disappointing. Is it not the inevitable effect of the assignment of complication to truth that the Universe is interpreted as cruel, as preferring those with heritage, genius and inheritance, and as damning all others to disadvantageous and small lives; and does not all despair come from this? 

In truth, truth is as simple and bare as the passage to life; we are not asked who we are and if we can afford the passage but are welcomed half blind, deaf and dumb, spanked on our back and become full and complete then and there; all our endeavors afterwards are superfluous except for this: to get to know this fact of complete wholeness by tugging at the diffuse veil of partial multiplicity, until it fails. 

This ideal endeavor knows no gear, diploma or ceremony and all enhancing substances are illegal, all exclusive courses are null and void. What can they tell us that we do not know? Do we not already and always see that the more we lie the more convoluted and perturbed we are; the more we are honest the clearer and freer we are; the harsher we are the more we are grated; the gentler we are the less we are hurt; the more reckless we are the more accidental we are; the more prudent we are the more sense we make; the more deceiving we are the more we are fooled; the more obvious we are the more we trust ourself; the more patient we are the more at peace we are; the more generous we are the more worth we have? 

Whoever in claiming that they have exclusive or rare access to this joy, the truest pleasure of living and of dying and of all existing, fools others through fooling themselves and is called a charlatan; but I too am no different when I scratch my corpse in an effort to satisfy an itch in my soul.

One of our tallest conceits manifests in the act of prayer, for too many it is nothing other than this: the delusion of knowing better than the grantor of Knowledge, to make requests of Reality, to disagree with the will of Will; and all blasphemy derives from that disposition.  

Besides, those who count themselves as safe from this conceit due to their devotion to a different altar, their religion of irreligion, are at greater sin yet: they do not even appeal to the highest authority they could think of, but to mere matter, chance and the pride of others, to set straight what they see as crooked, as false, as ignorant as they are, and if the world was left to them, if that Authority did not know better than to listen to them, we should have 195 countries worthy of solely ruling the world, billions of geniuses and an equal number of tyrants and prisoners.  

Let us begin anew by unlearning to ask and learning to receive, to cease speaking so that we might hear; for it is not that we get no answer but that we do not stop asking. In every silent moment there is the answer to every possible prayer: “Do what you ought, let come what may”.

This is one of those observations of ours that we read elsewhere for the lack of having written it down ourself: that advancement in age is automatic but advancement in intellect is volitional and, consequently, that there are many children wandering around in adult bodies who still hanker after the same toys and pleasures. 

Philosophy, then, is child rearing. What Mary gave birth to, only Sophia can complete: 

“I have found you in the care of those concerned merely about your physical cells, whether they may be cancerous or not, and I found their care lacking; for they do not learn what you must be taught - that the danger of the cancerous cell comes from its immortality, its unrenewed and unreviewed nature, that replicates until the body is consumed by it; and that, similarly but more vehemently, an immortal belief is one that consumes and kills its host also. 

Examine and reexamine. Regularly kill off both healthy and unhealthy idea and each time rejuvenate your selfsame commitment with fresh reason. If the absence of an idea serves you, let it remain extinguished; if it disserves you, let it be reborn and renewed again and again. Is this not maturity: proper development until complete health and complete health until peaceful dissolution?”

When abundance is abundant, those in the midst of it are often observed taking chunks out of it and throwing the rinds away; yet, those rinds still have enough bits on them to sustain those who have nothing but rinds thrown at them, and they are nourished from starvation towards another day of extracting the maximum from the minimum. If those in abundance can throw away that which to someone else still is a meal, they might be considered spoiled, and it is true - they are rotten and miserable. 

 It is this same spoiled rottenness in us that compels us to throw away hours at a time even though to others there are no more hours in the day than what we consider to be “leftovers”. The fleshiest and sweetest parts of their days are always eaten and yet they are thankful for the bits that remain, and they make better use of leftovers than we do of the juiciest chunks. We are so fat with time, we can hardly move - whereas the receivers of our rinds are so lean, their every moment in time is athletic, precise and considered. 

There is no paradox in this, scarcity begets longevity through efficiency while abundance exacerbates sedentarism through gormandizing. And even pleasures are wellest sheltered in scarcity - for greater pleasure is extracted from lesser means - and even the most opulent feast of finest shells and eggs from the floor of the sea cannot deliver the delight that scarcity takes in its daily bread and butter on the table of work. So why anyone is constantly preferring the spoiling of abundance over the tempering of scarcity is beyond understanding. 

Every time we round up the hour and call it too late, too little, not worthy of a beginning or an attempt, we are both consuming too much as well as throwing away too much: these are parts of a feast. If we cannot comprehend this, we still do not know the parts of the whole, the economy of life and the nature of Nature. No wonder, then, are we ashamed, bitter and all seems to be slipping away: we recklessly throw out what we will desperately miss.

The time truly suited for the mourning of the passing of a loved one is when they are still alive so that they may appear around the corner yet, thereby rewarding our preparation for their inevitable departure as well as adding to the joy at their ongoing existence. Will we not take them in our arms when we otherwise would not have, thereby increasing the number of times in which we have treated them as we should have while they were still alive, and leaving nothing to regret?  

Mourning after death is for the ill-prepared and the regretful; mourning before death is the very preparation for the prepared and mirthful. Also, mourning not as bereavement but as a continual practice of the remembrance of mortality, finity and finality which is our sole and proper means to the recognition of Immortality, Infinity and Continuity that pervades the Universe. There is no word for this practice – yet it is often the case that faults are described in higher detail than their preventative solutions.   

To remain unmoved is unconsciousness; so is to sob and vail – do you have not love enough to have considered the ends of all that which is lovable? – but the middle condition is consciousness: as in life, your having been present denotes your absence and your having been absent underscores presence, and so in death, your permanent absence denotes your permanent presence, since all that was truly loveable about you existed before you and will continue to exist at least until the universe will fold on itself to turn a new epoch in which nothing better can ever be; for the best belongs to infinity and we belonged to the best.

The awareness is rising of a thread wrapped around the toe of the sonship on this earth which goes back into history and runs through Christianity, but is not it, binds Ancient Greece, but is not it; although they would unravel without it. Muhammad and Plato pulled it taut, Siddhartha and the pagan unknown plucked at it, and those who follow its vibrations travel through all thought ever taught to find the other end tied around their finger also; circular and singular, cyclical and unceasing, never contained in one time or one creed – a self-assembled religion, unpronounced and never presumed complete in scope or truth but always common in Truth, with mutual Prophecy and shared Beneficence:  

“Blend your voice into tradition and tradition into your voice as the singer dissolves into the choir and the choir into the singer and the color and warmth of the tone is increased, indistinguishably.  

So that your own self may be taken up into the choir, stand apart no longer – puny and shrill – and so that your own self may be woven into thread of timeless universality, fashion yourself from common material, mutual and indistinguishable from Grace which extends onto yourself when yourself extends onto it and which you extend onto when it extends unto you.”

At the point of acquaintance with the universal will, the timeless reality, the ruling idea, I cease all operations of inquisition and probation; for while the search for truth is true and proper, its interrogation once found is false and unscrupulous.  

“I am alive, but am I dreaming or awake, waking or descending, knowing or imagining, feeling or being felt?” 

“You are alive.” 

“I have a will, but is it mine or is it unfree, can I guide it or does it guide me, is it weak and can it be stronger? 

“You have will.” 

“I have faith, for anything I can believe is proof of it, but where must I put it, whence is it put to me, can I have more of it? 

“You have faith.” 

It is the placing on top of fundamental facts the superfluous and flimsy speculations that is our peril and misery. And it is the directing of universal divine vows towards specific and profane ends that is our treachery. 

And while the facts and vows of the Universe constitute the fundament, furnishing and gilding of our beneficence, they put not a single shiver in our constitution, but all our diseasment comes from the many wedges of distraction and denial that we force between us and them so that we may be distanced from the ground of truth that disavows and disproves us from all our blind ambition and furious thrill-seeking which are so agitating but so dear to us also. 

Thereby it is that the grace of the Universe is bestowed on them who make no addition to the fundamentals, who make no debris come onto the ground of being and who do not stray from the narrow path of truth: 

“If I am alive then I am living; if I have will then I am willing; if I have faith then I am faithful; and when did completion and finality ever require any addition or furtherance?”

The greatest goods are those that can be attained by unencumberable choice – that which can be elected regardless of anything. The second greatest goods are attained by encumbered preference – the application of choice limited to certain options. The third greatest goods are attained by encumbering endurance of all that is not up to us whereby we are saved from the dispossession of the first and second greatest goods. 

To choose what is best, to prefer what is better and to endure all that is thereby presently occurring is the application of Reason which accords a human with human nature, struggle with virtue and life with meaning. 

This truth is undeniable, unhinderable and unchangeable by all that is not itself. Choose truth, prefer to tell it rather than a lie, and endure the consequences of having done so in order that your choice and preference may endure as well. Who can stop you now? not from living, but from having lived.

There prevails the fear among those who prevail in fear that the act of defining oneself is the construction of the self and that to set an end to the defining of the self is the destruction of the self – that one might cease to exist – yet, deconstruction is not destruction and all that remains in their own way is their own self.

For even those who wish to be regarded as honest abstain from lies only for their own profane furtherance, much like lies are used to the furtherance of those who wish to be regarded as successful. In this, the honest and the deceitful, the passive and the violent, the pious and the infidel, the kind and the mean are selfsame: they put the virtues in service of themself rather than themself in the service of virtues.

The pestilence of identity, the fatality of attachment, the misery of falsity is this – that no one will ever rightfully speak in this way about those who take pride in being spoken of in this way:

“He was very ill, but he made those who pity him pity themselves when they met his cheer. They felt sick for being healthier yet more listless than him.”

“He had much injustice thrown his way, but the approval and deference of those who maligned him would have been insignificant in comparison to the benefit which he bestowed upon himself and gave out effortlessly to all others.”

“They could have beaten him to a pulp yet never even bruise that which was the true object of their spite, panic and resentment: he could not be forced to entertain or endorse any of their vices, corruption and meanness. Even his shattered spine would have been stiffer and straighter than theirs; not a single lie escaped his lips, not a single unatoned sin is his legacy.”

It is nothing but a life in accordance with virtue that makes these words apply to anyone and everyone and it is the unironic acerbity of the Universe that those who are forever engaged in the toil of becoming someone are always denied that which can be achieved by anyone and everyone.

To delay relief, to postpone introspection and to put off nourishing the intellect by holding out for the favorable moment or the conducive environment is to contribute to the atrophication both of the ability to relieve as well as the ability to get back to tension; for it is the reliance on temporal or physical change in location to access that which one always carries with oneself that makes one unreasonable, limited and in need of respite of all that is unreasonable and limiting.

Philosophy, so far as it is communion with oneself as well as the timeless and universal ideas which rule the Universe, is both relaxation as well as exertion which both recharges and strengthens the musculature that toils and rejoices towards wisdom. The more commonplace this time of active leisure can be and the fewer pieces of equipment it may require, the more beneficial it will be. The ability to conduct a restorative treatment in one's own mind without having to rely on an alignment of things is the ultimate freedom and the source of boundless vitality.

If we are still looking for a key to align the pins within the lock so that it may turn and allow access to ourselves, we better find it quickly, for locks seize when not exercised.

The vices, not having the advantage of truth, goodness and intrinsic being, resort to a pervasive urging, applied during tide times of awareness, of bringing forth promises which they do not intend to and are not able to keep so that they may infiltrate, squat and board in the vacuum of that which does have its own existence, truth and goodness: virtue. 

Shadow gives way to light but light cannot be displaced by shadow; the very absence of light is the only existence of shadow. This too is how it is with awareness, the one and only native existent, which favors virtue and in fact recognizes no other substantial nourishment, is always kin to being over non-being, light over shadow, justice over injustice, truth over untruth, sanity over insanity and all else insubstantive which grows in the absence of reality, truth and beauty.

All ugliness is the absence of beauty, all badness is the absence of goodness, unrealness is the absence of reality and absence of awareness is the presence of all that is ugly, bad and unreal.

So it is then that the majority of the days of them who are drawn to virtue shall not be spent in fixing to become good, true and beautiful but to be fixed to this: remaining aware.

How true that death is change but that change is not death, it is life.
Them who have grown from childhood into maturity have died of childhood and have changed into maturity. They did not wish to remain children for their whole life and so Nature provided; just like it had provided for the wish of games and toys, then it provided the yearning for their proper work by having them lose interest in the one and increasing the wanting for the other – imperceptibly transitional death occurred.

And so it will provide again when their proper work is done; their bodies will feel achily stale, increasingly less reluctant to change into the next station and, even if death may come before then, it will be a death died well posterior to a life lived well and anterior to the next transcendence from whatever this was into whatever will be.

It is to the utmost benefit of the benefactor to keep an eye on their transactions in order to see if they are dealing in good faith or if they be corrupt. A benefactor looking at the hands of their beneficiary only to ensure a proper handoff is proper themself, but one who looks at their faces too is looking for more than to give benefit – they want it back in the form of gratitude – and they are frustrated if it be not returned.

But seeking to do the right thing can never frustrate, disappoint or deject, for it is a benefit bestowed on oneself without the involvement of anyone else. ‘Seeking’ because even the doing of a right thing is not up to the doer; only their own intention is. ‘Only’ since it is exclusively this intention which is the highest worth of any benefaction – attempted and completed, failed or not even attempted or attemptable – and there is nothing that is more beneficial than to have this intention and nothing more deleterious than the lack of it. A proper-intentioned benefit gone unnoticed is still at its highest beneficence whereas an improper-intentioned benefit gone unnoticed is considered a catastrophe.

But the true catastrophe is that all this trading of benefits blinds us to our greatest benefactors: those who have this proper intention but have nothing to give. How they yearn to help us but do not have the profane means to do so – and we do not see them. Why is profanity so prominent and divinity so dim? But it is not so, for I draw my living from one but my life from the other.

“Your intent of benefit is greater than the benefit – rather, it is the highest benefit. Here is a soul stronger than its body, a will harder than its means and an intellect brighter than gold. What use have I left for means, I am with the ends now, let all those with means save themselves. They remain beneficial for benefit’s sake rather than true for Truth’s sake. But my truest benefactor is the truest intention, he expects nothing of me, and justice is most pleased with our non-transaction.”

Those who are pressed by immediate concerns throw out higher concerns, and there is no time to let a bath and to wash up an insight, there is no space to take a walk and to let an idea run, there is no effort to be spared to wrestle a belief – the very lack of abundance begets the abundance of lack; the immediacy of lower concerns broadens the divide between the higher concerns and the time when they may finally "be gotten to”.  

It is a being trampled to the very last nerve before capitulation – but this never occurs; the destruction of the final stronghold which would make a truce inevitable and palatable to the old governance, and opportunous to a new regime, never manifests. No one ever goes hungry, yet no one is ever fed for which they wish to be fed – only for half-dead survival too feeble for revival.  

And the thought never occurs: Rather than service to the lower for sustenance, what about dedication to the higher and to be fed through the lower which are fed by the higher? for the patronage of a king brings both the grub as well as the commission. Sustenance has never brought anyone vivification, but that vivification has once failed to bring sustenance is unheard of also. 

Survive through that last nerve and lean on the gates no longer. Let your means of today be taken which you gathered most of yesterday so that you may come up deficient tomorrow, too depleted to start coming up with the means for the day and finally at leisure to repent and to try this new thing – to stare in the eye of everyone: “I am to be fed for my highest Good or for nothing at all; I will be sustained first and foremost in the spirit or not at all; I will be patroned towards transcendental works or not at all” and see if the means do not materialize.

It is on every master’s lips that dedication to the lower brings merely the lower, the higher are not called on, but dedication to the highest brings itself as well as all that is below it. One master says that the highest Good is Reason and another says it is Virtue. Unify your mind and strip everything of their differences: reason is that which is unaffected by senseless emotion and all virtues have in common that they aim towards justice – to do what is right, come what may. What is more of reason than that? Reason is the method of virtue and virtue is the practice of reason. To practice is to dedicate and to dedicate is to put attention towards. When will you finally come to pay attention to this and not to anything other?  

A mountain of happiness could never compress into even a spec of virtue, but a mere pebble of virtue can be the bedrock of joy.

Personality, all that is personal, is the cloister of the self – a walkway through life with a wall to deflect the wind on one side, a cover to divert the rain, and columns on the open side to carry the whole structure. We walk nowhere else any longer, for this is the only path for us that we are secured by, familiar with and protected; all else is mean and foreign and wild. 

When we say that “things are so impersonal, rude and unaccommodating”, then, we mean that they won’t go along with our illusions and that they won’t shield us from reality which sometimes blows, sometimes drops, sometimes radiates but is always true – for it is occurring – and the reality of truth has no other feature than this: that it is. 

Each impersonal fact of which we seek protection is another side walled, another draft plugged, another stretch of earth quenched and leveled; and soon enough we are in smooth, silent, sequestered environs that are horrendously personal and deeply isolating. 

But there is nothing more personal than reality, and truth, and our own self – which is part and parcel, instance and incident of this actuality and verity. And there is nothing more freeing than the sky with its blessings of wind and rain and light, which is knowledge; and there is nothing more exalting than the terrain which descends and rises, steeps up and down, which is the basis of being; and there is nothing more expanding than the horizon which is when vision is at its sharpest, for the eye is not calibrated for the distance at which walls sit, but for as far as it can see; and the mind too is made for its highest idea and vision – all of which are trained, enabled and fulfilled when put in their largest possible environment: impersonality. 

When we wish to “personalize”, we wish to confine, strangle and condemn a part of the truth and a part of reality in order to “make it our own” and the rest of the world becomes a stranger to us – as we wished. 

It seems to me now that the only determinant of a proper and an improper act, even if they be the same act, is that one is motivated by emotion largely and the other by reason mostly: it is as wrong to give a blanket out of pity as it is right to give a blanket out of fairness. 

Charity, which is motivated by sorrow, is an emotive act to alleviate suffering – chiefly the suffering it generates within the charitable person which denigrates the people that it judges as helpless. And it is still desperate if the acts result in outcomes below a certain threshold of significance, which is yet another cruelty: the fervor to see the world moved by one's actions. 

Justice, which is motivated by reason, is the deliberateness that directs its resources in a manner most logical and looks for nothing other than its own intention being fulfilled. It asks not whether the goods have been appreciated and put to good use; It is well and truly sane – as sane and well as it was before its attempts and actions. 

The only reason that the cruel and unjust acts of emotion are allowed in the lives of caring people, and even required, is that emotion claims love to be its own, but fact is that love is furthest to emotion and closest to reason – it is not a feeling of caring but a state of justice which, in turn, is the source of all the virtues that degenerate when they are mishandled by emotion: honesty into arrogance, integrity into pride, prudence into licentiousness, temperance into envy.

There is nothing more unlike truth than surfaces – and all of pomp is surface: the gilded walls, the carpeted floor; the painted face, the perfumed skin. How can those who adore and adorn surfaces be brought to the love of depth, the depth of love? Why, don’t their gilds and foils come from bedrock deep within the earth? And might they thereby not be shown the love of that which has sedimented it there, which has fused it inside and even that from which the ability comes to decide whether to break it open or to leave it alone?  

And so those who are looking to be dazzled by dazzled surfaces, need only to be brought to a window – a break in surface – and to be shown a greater expanse so that they may let their vision not be stopped by surfaces, but let it run out somewhere toward the horizon and leave nothing to turn around to their own self. For it is that nervous leftover vision that demands the adornment of limitation and to make it bearable. But it all rubs off and is put on evermore; as the layers increase, all surfaces close in on the self. Meanwhile, the layers of the earth only uplift the now and bury the past. All one has to do is to stand on the ground of Truth rather than layer on the demands of wishes onto all that meets the eye.

He who knows that he is standing on a carpet but that it is not the carpet that holds his weight, and that it is also not the floor that holds the carpet which he stands on that holds his weight, and that it is also not the joists that hold the floor which holds the carpet which he stands on that bears his weight, and that it is also not the soil on which the fundament of the house rests which supports the joists which hold the floor which the carpet lays on which he stands on that carries his weight, knows that it is the core of the earth which all standing and resting and supporting has in common and that this is ultimately what supports his own mass.  

 And in such this way he knows that it is his opinion that he bases all actions upon but that it is not his opinion that he has in common with all whom think and act and that it is not his belief which his opinion rests on which he bases his actions on that he has in common with all who believe and opine, but that it is the capacity, the equipment, the ability to believe that he has in common with every single thinker, believer and actor who ever thought, believed and acted.  

Travel to one end of thought and grab the furthest belief in that direction and set it next to the belief of the most opposing opponent and see that they are twins separated at the birth of belief to receive a different tutelage. 

 To perceive, then, only the differences in the compositions of the rugs, the designs and traditions in which they have been woven, and to put a man into a certain order and category of man based upon which rug he chooses to stand on, is to miss the common ground and fundament on which all believing rests and which has borne and continues to bear every belief and every believer.  

And do tell: when is it too early or too late to learn of this? What signal must flare or sound before this vision may be acquired? 

Whosoever has ever placed an obligation on me and had the authority to do so, and whence did they take this authority? From another person? Why did they need this other person and where did that person take it from? Did they take it from the ultimate Authority which pervades and constitutes the Universe? If so, does this Authority leave me out, does it not speak to me also? 

Am I not in turmoil whenever I pretend that which is louder is more imminent and that which is more imminent is more important and I ignore what comes from within me in favor of that from without: the expectations and requirements of others which I obligate myself with and think that they have been placed on me by others even though I cannot even find whence they take this authority from? And does everything obeyed to out of obligation not lead to bitterness since no one has ever done anything selfless out of obligation which is impossible since obligation is to do something for others not out of love but due to requirement and nothing done without love, and wholly out of love, can be selfless? 

Everything that this true Authority wishes, it communicates to me an nothing that has been communicated to me thusly has any need to come to me via the expectations of others and if I shall ever hear something that I do not, and continue to, hear from within from without, then I shall know that has no right to enter me. 

To expect, require and obligate, then, are serpentive acts and to be expected, required and obligated, to accept these unauthorized commands, is equally to twist and turn away from Authority, from Nature and the Universe and to live a life against and away from Reality which is misery all the way to expiration which many call and bemoan as “the way things are”. 

Friendship should be a preparation for its absence and not be a distraction from its own nuisance and its nuisance is this: every time it assures that one does not have to suffer alone, it assures one that they have to suffer also. And for as long as it holds a hand, it occupies it too. It is both the caretaker as well as the caregiver – it takes care to fill with care. 

Each situation served by life is the very material, and the only material, available to use toward the good of someone or something that stands in connection with it. Every time a friendly condolence arrives and recklessly assures me of my direness, it is in fact a pestilence, but this epidemic includes the material for its cure:  

“You are sorry for my loss? Did I own the departed? Does anyone lose anything that they did not possess? And do the insensate wish for us to feel that they have abandoned us, did they wish it in life, are they able to wish it now, and even if able, are they willing?” 

“I suppose you are right.” 

That supposition is the kernel and seedling of their salvation. It is the founding material for the growth that holds the earth on the cliff and prevents the mudslide - but it is so often washed away in the saline floods of the bereaved. 

Any fellowship that only consoles is thereby closer to enemyship than friendship, for it is merely distraction and lacks consolidation. 

When and only when leaped truly without expectation and without hope that a net will appear; when penetrated darkness so far that one’s eyes become so thirsty for light that they open up wide enough to scare oneself in the mirror; when estranged so totally from all obligations that they seem to have been taken on long ago by a mad impostor using one’s own name; when the bottom of the world is fallen out, which used to be held up by an inattentive belief in customs, traditions and culture overall, and undifferenced to the dropping in one’s own stomach, this is when saved, for it is realized that there is no being saved and this is when something is made of oneself, for it is understood that one never was and never will be someone and this is when destination is reached, for it is acknowledged that there is no conclusion.  Those who are still scared by Truth, they are still in fear; how else should it be? 

Those who are accepting of this are accepted, they are relieved and lightened, freed and exalted, liberated and purified; how else could it be? 

Those who suffer most, suffer most from imagination, and those who suffer from imagination, suffer in imagination, but the listlessness and discouragement of it is carried to all other arenas of their life. 

I confess to you my strong suspicion that nothing good in this world is accompanied by bad; that there is no profanity we must swallow along with divinity and that all that is truly necessary is wholly right without any tumor or parasite attached to it. And us, who are constantly harassed by the imagination, only allow this because we think that it also brings with it the vision of improved positions and beautified conditions. Otherwise, our suffrage of it would end. 

Some one or other brave spirit should look into this whole business of imagination – if it really be necessary, if creativity does indeed stem from it or if it is all just a nightmare, a tortured delusion and if we may dispose of it altogether without loss of that vision that sees all that should be but is not yet. For if all the yet-not-created can be seen by the creative vision, if that seeing has nothing to do with imagination but is simply a vision of that which could be, should be, and if it is clear as day but only yet uncreated, then we may discard this imagination which engages in constant harassment, warped illusion and filthy unreality which never even comes to pass as it depicts. 

We must be bold enough to assert that nothing which harasses us could possibly want what is good for us and, indeed, does this not seem obvious once put out in the open? What has been concealing it thus far? Don’t say we have been imagining complexity and overlooking simplicity for this long – or is this exactly what happens each time prior to one’s own slapping of one’s own forehead? 

It is to the utmost benefit of the benefactor to keep an eye on their transactions in order to see if they are dealing in good faith or if they be corrupt. A benefactor looking at the hands of their beneficiary only to ensure a proper handoff is proper themself, but one who looks at their faces too is looking for more than to give benefit – they want it back in the form of gratitude – and they are frustrated if it be not returned.  

But seeking to do the right thing can never frustrate, disappoint or deject, for it is a benefit bestowed on oneself without the involvement of anyone else. ‘Seeking’ because even the doing of a right thing is not up to the doer; only their own intention is. ‘Only’ since it is exclusively this intention which is the highest worth of any benefaction – attempted and completed, failed or not even attempted or attemptable – and there is nothing that is more beneficial than to have this intention and nothing more deleterious than the lack of it. A proper-intentioned benefit gone unnoticed is still at its highest beneficence whereas an improper-intentioned benefit gone unnoticed is considered a catastrophe.  
 

But the true catastrophe is that all this trading of benefits blinds us to our greatest benefactors: those who have this proper intention but have nothing to give. How they yearn to help us but do not have the profane means to do so – and we do not see them. Why is profanity so prominent and divinity so dim? But it is not so, for I draw my living from one but my life from the other. 
  

“Your intent of benefit is greater than the benefit – rather, it is the highest benefit. Here is a soul stronger than its body, a will harder than its means and an intellect brighter than gold. What use have I left for means, I am with the ends now, let all those with means save themselves. They remain beneficial for benefit’s sake rather than true for Truth’s sake. But my truest benefactor is the truest intention, he expects nothing of me, and justice is most pleased with our non-transaction.”

EXODUS 31.5 

And it has not yet been relayed to the people that they have been sanctified and that His sabbaths do they keep - for it is a sign between Him and them - and that them who do work in it have been cut off from the midst of their people. 

And their hands are shaking in idleness and their thoughts darken on them that they are abased and abandoned – for this man who brought them up out of the land of Egypt, they have not known what has happened to him. 

They do desire relief by their own means and they are intending to have gods made who can go before them. They have been departing as some one young man speaks unto them and recovers a great many of them. 

"All virtue is proper intention and all vice is awry result. Envy is goodwill grown bitter, deceit is truthfulness sacrificed to greater ends, vanity is self preservation cajoled, pride is gratitude become ambitious, anger is patience made righteous, injustice is the fervented fight in the name of justice. You keep affixed to your own intention and you preserve it and nothing does befall you; fixate on denouement or effect and anguished peril you are experiencing. Remain of the light that is covered by the mountain, not in the shadow cast by it – do not derange your own self." 

The imperfect hide their imperfection from the crowd because they assume that the perfect stranger dwells within it; and they worry to become exposed to him. 

But how do the imperfect intuit their imperfections and how can they still feel shame for concealed imperfection? 

The perfect stranger is within - he is me. My shame is his unfamiliarity with imperfection perceived as my guilt; and my imperfection is this perception.  

Perfection: not to become the perfect stranger, but to be nothing other than the perfect stranger. 

To see the point is to be one end of a line – to stand in such a relation to the line that it appears as a point. 

To be one end of a line is to have a connection. A connection of the most direct and necessary path – directness necessitated by necessity; necessity directed by directness. 

Such is the formation of the electric arc: the connection between two points eager for each other becomes necessary and the electric current ionizes the air, not waiting for the two points to touch but making the connection sooner through a luminous plasma channel. 

To miss the point is to be passed by – to not be deemed the shortest path by that which looks for the most direct connection.  

To be struck by Truth necessitates conductivity which is not an activity but the state of being conducive. As a silent room is conducive to study for its voidness of noise, so is a dispassionate mind conductive to Truth for it is devoid of turmoil and pure of impurity. 

My density and complexity then is my non-conductivity, my resistance, and I am not yet bare.  

But I hear the popping and the humming and I see the arc and, while it bypasses me currently, it is heating the air surrounding me and it is ionized and that which is necessary - reality - will  flow through me too when I have made myself necessary to necessity.

Awareness knows not within and aims to find out without and her means are five, fivefold, five-parted: seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and touching. While she needed no means to wonder and no effort to not know, she now needs materials and to struggle.  

Her outward work has never led to inward success and her learning there has never led to a knowing here. And so she keeps learning more and more about all that is not her and she becomes receptive of true knowing less and less. She has become so learned that she has come to reject the idea that true learning is forgetting and true activity is stillness.  

The not knowing within was never a prompt to dissolve into multiplicity via the five means, never a question to be answered, not a lack to be filled, not a threat of non-being to being or a mission to be accomplished. 

Her not knowing was her receptivity; her not needing to know was her perfection. She knew more in that state than she ever learned afterwards:  

She knew she was not her identity,  
She knew she was not the body which houses her,  
She knew she was not her means,  
She knew she was not her ambitions,  
She knew she was not her worries,  
She knew she was not her desires,  
She knew she was not her obligations.  

Not realizing she knew what she was by knowing all that she was not, she inversed her state; from receptivity to busyness, from stillness to noise, from effortlessness to toil, from divinity to profanity, from intention to outcome, from inwardness to outwardness.  

Now she is concerned not with her own virtue, but with the vices of others, and she too has become a stranger to herself.

The will and ability to take all that one is served by - one's tools, environment, and even one's own body - to its limit in functionality, but to leave them well below the limit when it comes to display of their competence, cannot result in anything other than efficiency, constancy, strength and effectiveness; even imbuing them with a special aesthetic.

This too is acting in accordance with Reason, to nourish one's virtues and enfeeble one's vices. A person who nourishes themself and enfeebles themself thusly is properly 'done up'; their color, scent and gait reflect their deeds and their deeds waft of justice, shine of prudence and smack of clarity and in our embrace of such people we are told: 

"The scent does not rise for the presence of the nose, but naturally emanates from that which has replaced all other smells. One cannot smell lavender and not become at ease. Leave yourself no other choice: become simple."

All confusion arises from the misalignment with this law:  

ALL THAT IS TRULY GOOD IS WHOLLY GOOD 

There is not one of us who disobeys this law out of ignorance, rather it is a sort of defiance; for it is written in each act and enforced by every outcome. 

We are constantly attempting to become unpunished criminals, to loot and to live happily after, and our attempts are akin to eating soup made up of a fresh potato and a rotten one and we are always devising ways to have all of the good potato and none of the bad one. The soup is not wholly good and so it is not truly good. You will have to be satisfied with the nutritious skin of the good potato or sick with comfortable warmth of the soup. 

And every time when your righteous anger leads you to cantankerous hatred, 
your esteemed pride deflates you to enfeebled shame, 
your desire for what you deserve escalates you to greedy ambition, 
your educated speculation fevers you to deranged delusion, 
your thrill of ecstasy leaves you jaded, 
your distracted imagination dreams up fearsome illusion, 
say this: 

I am a fugitive - not of the law, for not a movement of mine escapes it, but of the bounty which all my crimes deprive me of: peace.

Conspicuity of motion to the eye evidences the convention of stillness. 

Blatancy of noise to the ear proves the standard of quietude. 

Flagrancy of commotion to the mind denotes the norm of repose. 

My nature does not point itself out to me directly – nothing at rest raises its hand. 

Only perversity makes itself known – it is a stranger in my land – and it is at unrest.  

And as turbulence, calamity and war unrules me, it points out peace as the rule. 

Whenever, then, I detect motion, I shall notice stillness also. 

Whenever I am assailed, I shall declare peace also. 

And return each time to that due to which disturbance is an unusuality. 

How wonderful our pursuit and how much more wonderful that which we pursue, but to be pursuing is to be wanting, and we who are wanting are not satisfied with possessing - for then we are disallowed from wanting our desires by being allowed to have them. 

If we are determined to no longer be left wanting but to leave wanting, we must experience this shock: that our expertise of pursuing peace only hinders us when we arrive at it.

All excess has lack as its cause: 

Indulgence is the lack of self-control.  

The hoarding of physical luxuries is poverty in spiritual essentials.  

The desire to have power over others stems from the absence of it over oneself.  

Busybodiness is caused by idleness - a mind in need of distraction from emptiness.  

Luxuries are assumed to be above the essentials, yet no one who truly possesses the essentials cares for the luxuries and many who possess the luxuries lack the essentials; for excess, exorbitance, surfeit are the materials and results of desperate and futile attempts to substitute or compensate for the lack of that which is fundamental, essential, timeless and universal - that which we are born for but not born with: virtue.  
 

No one who is complete yearns,  

No one who has what they need hankers,  

No one who loves oneself hates another,  

No one who has peace has anger,  

No one who is self-sufficient is dependent,  

No one who has wisdom has fear,  

No one who partakes in the highest Good has neither need nor room for anything below it; and indeed, what is not below it? 

“From His fear the wind blows.”  

From his fear his world falls.  

Worlds he made for him are undone for him.  

Only he who sees Self as Self may live and live unmade. 

Only the unmade cannot be unmade. 

The inability of inability is proven by ability, but the ability of ability cannot be disproven by the inability of inability. 

That I can find meaning when the other cannot, disproves the other's belief that meaning cannot be found in such a situation. However, the inability of the one who sees themself unable to find meaning does not disprove my ability to find meaning in the same situation. 

Any random object throws a shadow on something or has one cast upon itself, and the sun passes over all of them; each time the earth orbits the sun, it is called a year. This, then, is all that is required for anyone or anything to rack up a long existence: to sit on a rock while it orbits a ball of fire.   

Those who rack up fewer orbits than what is commonly experienced or expected, are habitually considered to “not have lived that long”; to “have their life cut short”. They are comparing themselves to other animals, mere rocks and dirt, who also complete the same orbit at the same speed and just as mindlessly.  

Rather, they should be questioning if that sunlight, which hits anything in its path indiscriminately, found them indifferent too or if it came upon them racked with worry, bitter with envy, mad with anger and down with sorrow?  

Yes, I prefer a longer proper life over a shorter one, but only fortune can give me length. I will take length if it is granted to me, but if I am someone who begrudges brevity and yearns for longevity, I will only be adding length to misery – alive but not living.  

The wise live a fuller day on the solstice than they do in their entire existence, for the wise have given up complication and can infer a simple fact from another simple fact:  

A bigger circle of the same roundness is not more perfectly round than a smaller one; a proper life is not more proper because it is longer. 

In each rude crowd there is found without fail, one child who has duly been instructed on justice, another on temperance and yet another on prudence or benevolence or fortitude or magnanimity or patience etc. 

They disperse and the prudent strides down one street, the fortitudinous another and the just yet another. Hardly one of them can be followed home. Rather, it is wise to find where they all commune and are among peers only; where they not shine as stars among the dark ether but commune as the bright sun in the luminous sky – where they receive their instruction. 

Their academy is philosophy. It is here that they are introduced to each other. One who makes themself a peer of these pupils will find themselves walking out of this place of instruction as a group but with only one set of legs, eyes, and ears – a single minded observer, never broken up by a crowd and never dispersed into multiplicity, always singular and tensely relaxed, relaxedly tense, taut yet never stretched, neither lonely nor crowded, aware, unchanging and contently empty. 

To swim against the current, the flow of events, and to resent this stream for the burn in my muscles. This is my minor ignorance. My major ignorance: the non-understanding that my defiance, my burning and my ignorance is all part of the current, and that this Absolute knows not of this separation which is the basis of all suffering. 

Anything eaten for long enough becomes a delicacy. So it is that it has become a delight to slice open female fish for her eggs here, to boil duck embryos still in their shells there, to cut live octopuses and serve their moving tentacles yet somewhere else. 

But the universal delicacy are saline tears consumed fresh and produced often. As a side effect of this diet, there has not been a generation since the early morning of humankind that has not felt their opportunities diminishing, moral values decaying, physical environs crumbling and their needs neglected. They even regret having regretted their past regrets - this is the production secret of a particularly fine vintage. 

They are put off by those who grill tarantulas but think nothing of their own consumptions of thrills - and their march towards inevitable death through a meaningless world is their ultimate thrill.