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Camus says churches, political or religious, care not for the truth. They establish doctrines, which declare eternal aims, which never last.
The truth is at hand: touchable.
Even if you claim it does not last, at least it makes no false declarations of eternity.
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If life is anchored to something beyond life (a transcendent plane, such as heaven), you live life waiting or achieving another life elsewhere.
Your current existence is subjected to a future existence.
This can also happen in work, marriage, or ideology: living a life for a promised future, you will never encounter.
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Our desire to share pain as a bonding experience is baffling.
Our communal agreement in the awfulness is itself awful.
And yet I am grateful for people who will let me explain my pain; for those who will commiserate and agree.
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In art, ideas, or porn the access and commonality do not make it less amazing: access makes normatively banal, which shifts the sacred into the passe. This is obviously a deception: it merely shows that we value rarity, novelty and exclusivity to an extent that these traits conflate value with sacredness.
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My buddy can manifest. However, he is frustrated when others resist alignment with his desires.
Manifestation must be a powerful head trip. The danger is to use it as a tool: to bend the mystery of summoning into a transactional demand is contrary to the spirit of the source.
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Baron Munchausen once pulled himself and his horse out of a swamp by pulling upward on his own hair.
While this fantastical feat is humorous because it is impossible in reality, bootstrapping is precisely what we must do in the spiritual realm: lift ourselves through moxy and determination alone.
(idea from Slavoj Žižek)
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There was a time (before cell phones) when you could sit for 10 minutes doing nothing. Today we convert all time to use: your commute is time to learn, your evening is consuming entertainment to enable communal discourse tomorrow, and your vacation doubles as social media production.
Similarly, meditating (formally doing nothing) is now a practice requiring discipline: your 10 minutes is sanctioned work for mental health, requiring apps and guides to mitigate your drive to spring into action consuming or producing.
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“The people there are only there to make money, so we went home before sundown.”
A direct quote from a friend who went to Tulum, Mexico, where the sacred is commoditized until the tourists are scared.
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Our attempt for surety (or fixity) is a draw to stable descriptors of the world by which we may navigate.
We may push off from these mythologies and extend ourselves further.
This leap is the creative impulse: to rebel directly against the foundation on which we stand.
To cling desperately to the foundation without jumping is not life. Adhering to tradition as salvation is death.
