Everyman's dilemma

days like those, i remember why buddhism. if only i could dip into that disconnected calm and emptiness, at will. these days the closest i come is listening to a lowercase-t trancy song on repeat for a couple of hours.

it's a tough one. if my happiness depends on other people doing what i expect them to, i'll be as contingent as the stock market. but if i removed myself entirely -- the old self-reliance bit -- then what am i here for? personal gnostic growth? i feel the nobility of that idea deeply, but i can't embrace it... blame this on a too-early exposure to jewish mysticism (eighth grade, sidetracked from book hunting for a report)... i can't help believing we shards of the Absolute, if we are and if it exists, have something to do with and for one another. a conditional belief, but a sincere one: we aren't monads. the world minus me isn't just educational panorama-vision.

so there is Everyman's dilemma: find yourself, or find your place. they'll try to tell you there's no conflict, that you'll be most yourself in a place of your discovering or inventing; but once there, if you look closely, you may find that you stand out as the alien artifact all the more, wondering, 'does the universe want this? does it want me to want this? or is it frankfurtian in its tolerance?: loving this (you pick the this) is the very reason for this.'

by contrast, it's easier to know what you are as a gear turning with the rest toward some good, and for your own (hence religion), but then, what are you? a means? a gear, with some choice of turning speed? -- one that can suspect as much? how interestingly awful. ... so either way, taking a role (assuming a place) begs the question, i think, of who is taking it. on the other hand, taking the time to figure out what and who you are leads to a kind of world-weariness; to a sort of angst about there being no instruction manual, no diagram labeling you as which gear. ... find yourself: arbitrary in your role or determined in it. find your place: who am i to find it? i think we could do better without either bit of folk advice, since neither one amounts to much, and each pulls against the other.

i have a way out, but i don't always hold to it. and of course, it's both unoriginal and for most, still heresy (by whatever name). count me among those mystics: the Absolute did (or is) split, and we are splinters. we're not gears because we're not a wholly separate creation; and we're not arbitrary pick-your-flavor oversouls either (the freedom of which is their reason to exist), since we really are some of the broken Absolute, who, somehow collected or collecting, has an agenda. 'but uncle chris, an agenda is future-oriented... what if the Absolute is timeless?' well, then it only dabbles in time: it knows how to time, at least. beneath the nausea at the idea, there is room for the belief that our infinite future is only unending from here; that all and any of this mere progression, all of this mere matter mattering, matters.