Cosmic Life Truths
1) Nothing exists in a vacuum.
Ah, but how often we get deceived into believing they do. Geometrical thinking, I've called this in the past...parceling reality up into squares, artificial boundaries which we imagine to be inherent and fixed. We imagine races to be vacuums, and genders, and species...we conceive of each person as a self-contained ship, floating distinct and rigid on the Great Sea of the World.
Without colors and sand dunes, umbilical cords and manatees, Jupiter and rainstorms, black holes and tides, and menstrual cycles and second thoughts, I wouldn't even exist.
2) Never lose sight of the microcosm for the macrocosm.
This is an awareness I only came to recently. I'm always arguing that people should broaden their perspectives--and they absolutely should--but not at the expense of fully inhabiting one's own life. Everything is relative, and it isn't, simultaneously. Sometimes, abstracting too much from your own life and situation is an easy way out, an unwillingness to delve into the gritty tangled web that is your--that is all of our--birthright.
Sometimes the broadest perspective you can have is to be thoroughly present in the rich particularities and nuances of your most personal, immediate reality. To trivialize or dismiss one's own life and experiences is to ultimately trivialize and dismiss everybody's, as none of us exists in a vacuum. And, that adds up to a multitude of absent selves walking around, too scared or self-defeating to inhabit every moment and particle of their unique and unreplicable existence, which wouldn't be without the unique and unreplicable moments and particles of every other being in the universe.
3) Bodysoul is an inseparable continuum.
This one is tricky to even verbalize, as our languages are woefully dualistic. The idea of "soul" as something separate and distinct from body is null and void, and denies the primal heart of what I believe to be the most sacred reality. It does not redeem human/animal/living reality, but reduces it.
Our bodies are not casings which house our souls; they are our souls. To know this is terrifying, exhilarating, and ultimately the most embracing truth I've yet discovered.
Soul, most especially, does not exist in a vacuum.
Ah, but how often we get deceived into believing they do. Geometrical thinking, I've called this in the past...parceling reality up into squares, artificial boundaries which we imagine to be inherent and fixed. We imagine races to be vacuums, and genders, and species...we conceive of each person as a self-contained ship, floating distinct and rigid on the Great Sea of the World.
Without colors and sand dunes, umbilical cords and manatees, Jupiter and rainstorms, black holes and tides, and menstrual cycles and second thoughts, I wouldn't even exist.
2) Never lose sight of the microcosm for the macrocosm.
This is an awareness I only came to recently. I'm always arguing that people should broaden their perspectives--and they absolutely should--but not at the expense of fully inhabiting one's own life. Everything is relative, and it isn't, simultaneously. Sometimes, abstracting too much from your own life and situation is an easy way out, an unwillingness to delve into the gritty tangled web that is your--that is all of our--birthright.
Sometimes the broadest perspective you can have is to be thoroughly present in the rich particularities and nuances of your most personal, immediate reality. To trivialize or dismiss one's own life and experiences is to ultimately trivialize and dismiss everybody's, as none of us exists in a vacuum. And, that adds up to a multitude of absent selves walking around, too scared or self-defeating to inhabit every moment and particle of their unique and unreplicable existence, which wouldn't be without the unique and unreplicable moments and particles of every other being in the universe.
3) Bodysoul is an inseparable continuum.
This one is tricky to even verbalize, as our languages are woefully dualistic. The idea of "soul" as something separate and distinct from body is null and void, and denies the primal heart of what I believe to be the most sacred reality. It does not redeem human/animal/living reality, but reduces it.
Our bodies are not casings which house our souls; they are our souls. To know this is terrifying, exhilarating, and ultimately the most embracing truth I've yet discovered.
Soul, most especially, does not exist in a vacuum.