Passion dies out in the old, but there is no credit in that. If your vices abandon you before you abandon them, you are no candidate for praise. The trick is for the young and the midstreamers to learn to control passion while there is time left to enjoy the passion-free state.
Category: Aphorisms and Observations
The Recluse Aphorizes, Laconically
By oneself one can be oneself.
Limits
The young should test their limits. The old, having tested them, should respect them. Two misfortunes: never to learn what one is capable of; to come to grief from attempting what one is incapable of.
They Refused to Look Through the Telescope
There were churchmen and other contemporaries of Galileo who, standing fast on convictions swotted up from the lore of Aristotle and his commentators, refused to look through the Italian's telescope. Similarly, there are atheists and mortalists today who, standing fast on convictions derived from less reputable sources, refuse to engage in the spiritual practices which could serve as their 'telescope.'
Just as the scientific attitude demands of us an openness to one range of experience, the religious attitude demands of us an openness to another.
Talk is Cheap?
Talk is cheap, they say, but the right word, at the right time, spoken from the heart with purity of intent to the right person can be priceless.
What Socializing and Whisky Have in Common
A little socializing, like a little whisky, is good. But more is not better. The sobriety of solitary silence is superior to the sloughing off of self into the social, and the value of the latter is to enhance, by way of contrast, the delights of the former. Thus spoke the introvert.
Why Run?
If the sky is the daily bread of the eyes (Emerson), then hiking, running, and cycling are the daily bread of the legs and lungs. And what better way to appreciate the sky, and the lambent light of the desert Southwest, than by running over mountain trails at sunrise? Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie.
Happiness and Outflow
Cogitative and seminal efflux are both in need of control, and it is reasonably surmised that control of either helps in the control of the other. It is more than reasonably surmised that control of both is necessary for happiness. But difficult it is to stem the tide of thought and seed.
Purgatory is Other People
Other people are mirrors in which we perceive distorted images of ourselves. But in these distortions truths lie hidden which we do well to discern.
This Life
Too dream-like to be real, this life is too real to be a dream. We cannot literally be "such stuff as dreams are made on" (The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1), but the spiritually percipient will catch the Bard's drift. "Our little life rounded with a sleep" is not a candidate for plenary Reality.
Memory and Happiness
It is we who supply the blood that enlivens the spectral vampires that haunt us from our past. A part of mind control is purgation of memory, and without mind control happiness is achieved with difficulty, if at all.
Of Blood and Blog
I don't think my experience is unusual: our blood relatives tend not to give a hoot about our blogging activities. They say blood is thicker than water, but consanguinity sure doesn't seem to translate into spiritual affinity. No matter, the community that we can't find by blood, we'll find by blog.
The people who know us take us for granted. Is it not written that "no prophet is welcome in his hometown"? (Luke 4, 24: nemo propheta acceptus est in patria sua.)
One could call it the injustice of propinquity. We often underestimate those nearby, whether by blood or space, while overestimating those afar.
An Escape From Reality?
If someone tells you that philosophy is an escape from reality, reply: "You tell me what reality is, and I'll tell you whether philosophy is an escape from it."
The point, of course, is that all assertions about reality and its evasions are philosophical assertions that embroil the objector in the very thing from which he seeks to distance himself.
Could It Be LIke This?
Every finite thing is vain, empty, fleeting, devoid of self-nature or own-being, ontologically and axiologically ambiguous, an admixture of being and nonbeing, of value and disvalue, anatta. And the system of these finitudes, the whole lot of them? The same. And beyond the system? Nothing.
The Citadel of the Here and Now
Retreat ever and again into the citadel of the Here and Now, and the dragons of elsewhere and elsewhen will turn to chimeras.