Sense of guilt...or something like that...
Why do people mark a spiritual search for a purer form of existence and consciousness by tapping on their sense of guilt? A desire to inhabit and to satisfy one's yearning for self-transcendence through peeling off layers of the self to get to one's core? How do we get to discover our own limitations and learning to come to terms with existential truths: the reality of death and suffering, for example. While exposed to existential doubt and despair during our sojourns, do we paradoxically achieve and attain a sense of renewal and regain a sense of and appreciation of life, dispelling our own stasis and inertia?
Perhaps it is true that enlightenment does not come from a cloistered existence but through serendipitous encounters, interaction and sharing, also the courage and risk in adopting an open stance or outlook in facing the ambiguities of life, death, poverty and suffering. How else do we discover much that is strangely unfamiliar, dismantle our familiar bearings towards a confrontation with reality and learn to grapple with spiritual crisis? Is it even true that troubling encounters destabilize, and at the same time, allow us to transcend inherited categories of thought and perception (fear, prejudice, bias)?
In bridging the self with the spiritual, should we be recognised as persons, and not statistical numbers or types that are merely pitiful, grotesque and predictable victims of bad fate? Maybe people just find temporary respite from such anguish, a negative capability, or while exposed and paralysed by existential doubt and despair, they paradoxically achieve happiness within?
Interesting phenomenon, yet something I can never truly understand. Is this the reason why I no longer feel the happiness of being happy? But wait, evoking a sense of guilt does result in the death of all stringencies, no?
Perhaps it is true that enlightenment does not come from a cloistered existence but through serendipitous encounters, interaction and sharing, also the courage and risk in adopting an open stance or outlook in facing the ambiguities of life, death, poverty and suffering. How else do we discover much that is strangely unfamiliar, dismantle our familiar bearings towards a confrontation with reality and learn to grapple with spiritual crisis? Is it even true that troubling encounters destabilize, and at the same time, allow us to transcend inherited categories of thought and perception (fear, prejudice, bias)?
In bridging the self with the spiritual, should we be recognised as persons, and not statistical numbers or types that are merely pitiful, grotesque and predictable victims of bad fate? Maybe people just find temporary respite from such anguish, a negative capability, or while exposed and paralysed by existential doubt and despair, they paradoxically achieve happiness within?
Interesting phenomenon, yet something I can never truly understand. Is this the reason why I no longer feel the happiness of being happy? But wait, evoking a sense of guilt does result in the death of all stringencies, no?