It's been a while humble reader (notice I didn't make that plural). I really tend to write for myself since this blog is not about gaining readership for a particular audience. I would never want to be honed into a compartimentalized blog brand anyhoots. Truth is essential, but essentially ignored by the masses. Moreover, much long form content like blogs are dying—albeit there may a bit of traction these days on substack for a certain kind of writer I'll never be.
The primary reason to keep this blog is to document key insights, whether it is from me (rarely) or others I come across (which is really me acquiescing to the fact that there is nothing new under the sun, and any good insight I think I may have come up with has already been established by someone in history). For instance:
The wish for a quick death so often voiced these days contrasts with the wish for death as personal act. Religious rites and memento mortis assume human beings approach the end of life not as extinction but a last duty laid upon them to perform. Suicide is not the model for a truly personal death. The actor and victim are one, though the roles are in contradiction. In suicide one does not surrender one's life; one 'takes' one life. In personal death, activity and passivity are not violently opposed in this way, but passivity and suffering are what is performed as an action. If surrender is the true proof of possession, dying is the supremely human act. An anticipation of death makes our life personal by penetrating and structuring it. Only the affirmation of the future perfect makes the present tense fully real. — Robert Spaeman
This hit me like a rock. Perhaps as I ponder death a bit more, I also fear the approach of it. It's like Woody Allen's quip: I am not afraid of death, I just don't want to be there when it happens. The Dharmic orientated folk will say that's the whole point: extinguish the “I” before you get there, and voilà... death is some sort of illusion or phase change. But I tend to be partial with the Christian notion that it's a bigger deal than that—the moment before and the eternity thereafter.
Also, selfishly I am sometimes on the fence of the trend towards euthanasia for the elderly and infirmed, seeing so many suffer on their way there and not necessarily wanting that for myself. This passage above articulated something in my heart I could not put into words clearly about avoiding the process: to suffer the surrender of life is the supreme human act.
*
Spiritual life is a metaphor for much of this. Some teach that the practice of it is a relaxed non-doing, as there is nothing that the contracted “self” can do. In reality, true spiritual practice initiates with another “human act,” or “gesture”—that of being directly, immediately present. We need to be in relationship with Life, and therefore set the conditions for this first. In Tibetan Buddhism, the term Mahamudra means “Great Gesture,” and the Great Gesture, or Act, or, Sacrament, which is common to both Mahamudra/Dzogchen and esoteric Christianity, is that of being consciously present—in relationship with and at-one with existence. This creates the paradox of an intense holding-on (or Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind) and a complete letting-go (or Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind).
*
In regards to documenting key insights, let's contemplate all the insights the recently deceased Pope Benedict XVI (Ratzinger) had which eventually boiled down to his final words: I love you Jesus. The most significant insight is always simple—not necessarily having profundity in content but conveying the depth and heart from where it arises.