But the story of the golden calf also reminds us that without rules we quickly become slaves to our passions – and there’s nothing freeing about that.
So, I must take the complexity of the world, reduce it to a single point so that I can act, and take everyone else and their future selves into consideration while I am doing so.
It was all those counterproductive forces that the Egyptians were attempting to conceptualize in the figure of Set, the enemy of illumination, enlightenment, vision, and consciousness.
Sanity is knowing the rules of the social game, internalizing them, and following them.
The queen of the underworld, the goddess of chaos, is also the force that eternally renews.
Life is what repeats, and it is worth getting what repeats right.
No matter how good your intentions, or how sweet and tolerant your temperament, you will not maintain good relations with someone you fight.
On top of all that is the general complexity of life, complicating the search for clarity. Consider the question “What really happened?” say, in a failed marriage, divorce, and child-custody battle. The answer to that query is so complex that settling the disagreements frequently requires court evaluation and multi-party assessment.
To me, cats are a manifestation of nature, of Being, in an almost pure form. Furthermore, they are a form of Being that looks at human beings and approves.
The fact is important enough to bear repeating: people organize their brains with conversation.
To say it again: it is the greatest temptation of the rational faculty to glorify its own capacity and its own productions and to claim that in the face of its theories nothing transcendent or outside its domain need exist.
Why would someone buy prescription medication for his dog, and then so carefully administer it, when he would not do the same for himself? Now you have the answer, derived from one of the foundational texts of mankind. Why should anyone take care of anything as naked, ugly, ashamed, frightened, worthless, cowardly, resentful, defensive and accusatory as a descendant of Adam? Even if that thing, that being, is himself?
Women have been making men self-conscious since the beginning of time. They do this primarily by rejecting them – but they also do it by shaming them, if men do not take responsibility.
To tell the truth is to bring the most habitable reality into Being. Truth builds edifices that can stand a thousand years. Truth feeds and clothes the poor, and makes nations wealthy and safe. Truth reduces the terrible complexity of a man to the simplicity of his word, so that he can become a partner, rather than an enemy. Truth makes the past truly past, and makes the best use of the future’s possibilities. Truth is the ultimate, inexhaustible natural resource. It’s the light in the darkness.
If you lean too far in one direction, something else in you leans equally far in the other.
If you betray yourself, if you say untrue things, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character. If you have a weak character, then adversity will mow you down when it appears, as it will, inevitably. You will hide, but there will be no place left to hide. And then you will find yourself doing terrible things.
At least I am taking care of myself. At least I am of use to my family, and to the other people around me. At least I am moving, stumbling upward, under the load I have determined to carry.
Your life becomes meaningful in precise proportion to the depths of the responsibility you are willing to shoulder. That is because you are now genuinely involved in making things better. You are minimizing the unnecessary suffering. You are encouraging those around you, by example and word. You are constraining the malevolence in your own heart and the hearts of others.
It takes careful observation, and education, and reflection, and communication with others, just to scratch the surface of your beliefs.
You’re not everything you could be, and you know it.
The way that you make people resilient is by voluntarily exposing them to things that they are afraid of and that makes them uncomfortable.