Monthly Archives: September 2011

happy?

21 Wednesday Sep 2011

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i was thinking about what an enormous and maybe impossible task it is for us humans to ever be happy.
it’s like the infamous *mulla nasr eddin said… “people, people, people. if only you weren’t people. maybe then you might be reasonable.”

we live in terrible times and the cause of all the suffering is the subjectivity of people.
powerful personalities will rule other entities who haven’t crystallized an ego characterized by a high degree of self-importance.
but since even these weaker beings whose identities are nebulous have essentially an equal in everything ego, they expect to be treated with respect. they may be gentler but suffer from the effects of self-love and most of them prefer dreaming to reality. they are easily fooled and lead lives of resentment and jealousy. their negative emotions rule them every hour of their waking existence.
as time goes by we all grow in abilities to survive the vagaries of accidental existence and coincidental choices. then something terrible happens. development stops. then people settle into unique patterns of repetition. nature uses them for her purposes; to transform the earth and propagate.

everyone on the material level knows what they want… more. we want more of everything, more room, more toys, more respect, more love, more strength, more help and more friends who love us.
people differ in the ways they go about getting more. these are differences of character, degrees of intelligence and the presence or absence of conscience.

in general we artfully dodge responsibilities which connect us to the society we live in. we say we want to be free. it’s natural, we’re between the animals and the gods. but more is said than done.
smart people pay their dues in advance and accept the results of their efforts with good grace. they know that if they wanted to they could have worked harder, manipulated more of their fellows, and barring infirmities or accidental death they could have climbed to the top of some heap built by the honest labors of others like himself. *if they had wanted to.

and sometimes the essence of a soul is not overwhelmed by the agrandizement of the personality. this mustard seed of a germ of a spiritual consciousness strives and struggles and suffers to discover the reason for its existence and its place on the grand scale of the universe.
though recognizing periodically that he/she is just a speck in all this largeness, and here for a relativly short duration, still will make a conscious decision to respond to life with a more passionate interest. and like a cairn terrier go into the hardest places to complete their mission; living more dangerously and yes! more dangerously if necessary, but also more generously.
this heroic effort is with an aim to knowing and understanding what his/her place is in the mystery of being.
rene’ daumal is dead but his work remains to rescue me from this swarm of words.

Last Letter to his Wife

I am dead because I lack desire,
I lack desire because I think I possess.
I think I possess because I do not try to give.
In trying to give, you see that you have nothing;
Seeing that you have nothing, you try to give of yourself;
Trying to give of yourself, you see that you are nothing:
Seeing that you are nothing, you desire to become;
In desiring to become, you begin to live.

Rene Daumal

let’s just try to help and stop complaining.

I_ArtMan
* a genius of arabic apochraphy and gadfly of great renown in the moslem world. (teaching through humor… stories about him were forbidden to be told in turkey. no doubt the power possessors preferred to keep the people hypnotized and docile.)