For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away.
Tao is so profound and yet in invisible, It exists in everywhere and anywhere. I do not know whose Son it is, it existed before heaven and earth.
In jewish thought, the concept of tzitzum describes God's initial withdrawal to leave space wherein creation can be. "He is the Place of the World, but the World is not His Place" compare the Gita Following the logic of this, the world would be nothing more than empty space, filled with grace. The world before God, or seperated from it, the photonegative image of him, and as the photonegative bearing a strange but persistant resemblance of its creator. The world as mysticism, as a "she," wisdom, σοφία, as a thing in blind but active obedience. Like God, the world is one; like him, it is foreign and strange but home.
Human beings as a deeper emptiness, an emptiness in the emptiness (the soul, the buddhist concept of anatman indestructible because of it's emptiness), that because of this can be moreso filled with God's presence, the breath. Human beings as a negative space with God passing through them, Simone Weil's "pride as forgetting we are God." (as in, human beings are not - God is the thing that is and acts in us.) The world is real because nothingness is real (it is as nothingness God exists in the world,) but also because of God's presence within it. All goodness is the world leaving room (as it is made to) for God's goodness to flow through. Evil, and the fall, as the refusal to bear the emptiness that leaves room for God. Kierkegaard's anxiety. This original leap into sin lays the ground for illusion. Falseness is not the same thing as emptiness, but behind falseness there's always the emptiness that's being concealed. To prefer emptiness over false fullness. True fullness - the presence of grace is never overbearing - it is thin like silk thread, never over-running the emptiness, always letting the emptiness stay. "I have seen God face to face and my life is preserved." Divine unity: the emptiness is still there, because it's the emptiness that are our true being. The emptiness is filled but it's filled as by something passing through it, never staying.
"For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away." True being has the nature of expansion: God is infinite yet his love "spills over," and creates the world, miracoulusly. Spousal love "flows over" and children are born, miracoulusly. The universe is infinite but expanding, an image. True things cannot be taken away because they exists as an emptiness. You can't take away true bravery, because trying to will only set it to the test. You can't take away true royalty because "my kingdom is not of this world" etc. Attempting to do so only makes it's expanding nature clearer. You can't take away a man's patience, because doing so will just show that he didn't have it to begin with. That character in a story that goes around improving everything seemingly without care or notice or pride, then moves on to the next situation and does the same, the image of a saint, a person who has and more is given. If a loved one dies, we say they live on in our memory; the non-existence and our longing is how they now present themselves, real, before us, ghosts, a photonegative of the person. Grief is love persevering etc. When Wanda grieves her husbad she loves him for the first time; everything before illusion. Illusions are the thing we do not have, and that even then will be taken away from us. The world as borrowed by us. When we try to make it ours, we start to percieve the world as cruel (Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed) and act irrationally about it, as if this would allow us to keep the things that did not belong to us. Inne i spegelsalem: "The painful thing about beauty is that you hunt it, hunt it, hunt it, and then when you have it, you panic that you will loose it - if I eat now, I'll get fat, if I BREATH, I'll get old." Take instead a woman who looks in the mirror and knows this beauty is just a thing passing through her, that she just happened to be in the way of, like a window letting through light at a certain time of the day, certain time of year, maybe once in a blue moon, watching astonished. To her no beauty can ever be lost. "He devotes all his energy but has no intention to hold on to the merit. When success is achieved, he seeks no recognition. Because he does not claim for the credit, hence shall not lose it." Tao Te Ching.
Anxiety about loss the anxiety about loosing the illusionary parts of the things we love, the things we imagine "ours," if at the core any part of it was none-illusionary. Have you ever had someone you admire do you a favor, and felt immensely special, even though any rational analysis of the situation would conclude that this was something this person would have done for anyone, and you just happened to be in a place that demanded it? A sort of impersonal act read as personal? A man holds the door for a woman, and she feels pride, even though for him it was a reflex. The door, the time, the meeting, the place, all coincidences, contingent on other things, yet she thinks herself special. The same humilitation underlays all pride towards beauty, talent, success, grace, etc. The only pride worth it's name: perserverance. But perserverance seldom leads to pride in the same way as other things, as it's so different in quality from other things. Perseverance never looks down on non-perseverance, it feels it's reality to the core, having experienced the gravitation to fall away from emptiness itself, and reaches out and shows another way. Talent doesn't share, sitting next to Mozart doesn't make you understand music (at least not when you're so far from musicality as a non-perseverer is from a perseverer) but just the presence of perseverance in the world, in your vicinity, spills over, gets in. Others, not prideful of their perseverance, say: What choice did I have? What else was I suppose to do? Unknowing saints. Sometimes pride ought to be extended to them, venerance, since their ability to make room and stand the emptiness in the truest sense makes them God-like.
The Fruit of Knowledge: eating God, the original sacrilege. "For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." (Compare: Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them.) The choice of the negative side of God, the created world. Falling into the sacred rythm of binding and loosing, living and dying, craving and recieving, good and evil, percieved duality. Not a bad thing, but a thing found through clawing out of emptiness, from a violent breaking of the first boundary ("You shall not eat the fruit.") Humans are really bad at understanding duality. We build arbitrary dichotomies, we blink, wondering if the world exists or not, we can't imagine non-being, were obsessed and dependent on boundaries and taboos in a way animals are not. The ego forms the first distinction, between outside and inside. Something pushes from the outside and we feel pain. Something breaks in completely and we die. Taboos form to protect us from violence, and allow us to step into violence when necessary. Sacrality. “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” The Tree of Life the active, essence of God. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood, a new violation, a new sacrality. Abandoning God through violation, reuniting with him through violation made sacred.
Knowledge as a true thing grows, knowledge as a false or partial thing closes in on itself and eventually withers away. Life as a true thing lives on, life as a false thing eventually dies, the flesh rots but the bones stay. The Church as a false thing is constantly dying, the Church as a true thing always surviving.
Convincing someone God exists, essentially impossible. Convincing someone God doesn't exist but that you should direct all your love, longing and worship to him, more feasible, and also more fruitful. Religion as a meaningless thing. Most people today know this - you cannot reillusion them that it isn't unless as a form of ideology, to fill the emptiness that religion should aim to preserve. A false religion - falseness and meaningless are not the same thing, but a false religion tries to hide the meaninglessness (perfect example: Russell M. Nelson, "An understanding of God’s fabulous plan takes the mystery out of life and the uncertainty out of our future." Only a false religion would claim such things.) The religious to which religion is ideology are easy to spot and a sad lot, but the pull is so strong that it's almost inevitable. A black hole has a massive gravitational pull and pulls religion down with it. God, not dependent on gravity, pulls away, "the dark night" emerges, as Jesus repeatedly leaves the masses of people following him, not contained by the gravitational force of other people -- the soul left alone falls away from it's false religion, leaving it either cleansed or clinging to an increasingly false, ideological, unjustifiable thing. If the soul admitted the emptiness, everything would fall apart; it is scared of death and fears it would die; there would be nothing left, it would feel unreligious at it's core, and there the Spirit could work. Another sign of owning a false thing: that it can "fall apart." A tree cannot "fall apart," it can wither and die, but not crash like a built thing. "Is it right for you to be angry about the bush? ... You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night." (Jonah 4:9-10) Things we have built for our own interests can fall apart, grown things cannot. People who hate the Church but always fear it will fall apart; people who love the Church but sense they have no place in it. Having "no place" always correct, as the Church should be a non-place. For those which it is a place that could be threaten, the love is less cleansed and threathens to fall into ideology.
What you can do, is do religion as the pointless thing it essentially is, and then wait for the Spirit to come down. Do all the acts knowing it is not enough, not anything at all, but still compulsively feeling the need to do them out of love. The burning bush - the holy flames doesn't consume the bush, the fire doesn't need the bush to burn, an image of religion. Compare Peter, Rabbi, it is good for us to be here. Let us put up three shelters. The bush thinking the fire needs it to burn. Religion sometimes revealing itself as nothing more than a pile of drywood that can or can't be on fire, largely independent of the drywood. What the drywood can do is convince itself "it is good for me to be here," or know it is simply "blessed (to be) invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb."
Prayer as the most pointless act, the emptiest thing; not knowing this it is almost painful to pray, knowing this it is an act of rest. Praying like David pouring out the good wine. Wasting time. Love. Do religious acts as the farmer who "would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, and he does not know how." Do them extravagantly and pointlessly intricate as a Catholic high mass, as if to fight God out of hiding, anxious to do something, anything, to express the grandness of love and longing: then watch all effort fall aside for him to come down in the simple form of wine and bread.
You know, about 90% of missing "the old internet" is probably just nostalgia. But sometimes I fall into the old web - some old forum, and 8 years old youtube video - and I'm struck by this absurdist, simple, sort of empty aesthetic of everything. There's this almost holy ability of an old youtube video to hold onto the thought "we don't know everything, and that's fine. stuff's pretty weird, it's probably always been that way. i love you." A sort of tranquil understanding of the world that bring on this easy emphathizing with anyone, that was maybe bound to collapse, just a moment. Chesterton has this view of the "fenceless society", or the fencless religiosity: We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased. The obvious thought at Chestertons That's also something I long for when I think about the 2000s-2010s. I like to tell meself because there was more of a sense for this room back then, but most likely because in the 00-10s, I was a literal kid, who would lay on literal meadows and look up at the literal sky and think People always ask, "what's the meaning of life?" And I would think: What the fuck does that even mean?∎