The Good lives after Death

The Good lives

In view of the Hereafter, thinkers across the ages seek wisdom in Death. In Death, somethings are certain to us from this side of the veil, others are shrouded in mystery, only the dead know Death after all. What we do know is that Life lives on as something much bigger and older than itself when it passes on. Whether the individuality of a given soul or the memory of their body is preserved after Death is a mystery to me. What I know for sure is that my body will decompose into matter that will fuel the pulsing life of our Earth, the worms, the trees, the grass, the fruits and roots of our world. My spirit will continue loving and impacting my people after I’m gone, their children, their children’s children, all the people whose lives I’ve touched, and all the people their lives will touch, my Spirit will live on as the Spirit of Human history, the world Soul. When you look at Death like that, as returning our bodies and life to the world we borrowed them from, here on this Earth under the Sun; returning them to the cosmos that our little Blue Rock borrowed its own matter and Life from; When we ground our understanding of Death in the sacrifice of the individual life for the continuation of the much older project of life here on this Earth, it can be much clearer why the Good is authoritative in our moral lives, because time is ticking in view of these final doors. It can also be more clear why the collective interests of the living fabric every human, animal and plant takes part in, hold the same kind of sway over our individual interests as our personal interests as self-seeking individuals. Funny how that works, because it turns out Death clarifies te nature of selfhood as fundamentally relational rather than individualistic; we carry in the indivisible seed of our ‘Self’ the love and memories of the world we came from, bonded not only to Mothers that birthed Us, but also the millennia of human, animal and vegetative history that made our birth possible in the first place. The world we keep alive far after we’re gone.

Feel with the Mind when Navigating the Heart.

Situate the Heart within its sensible substratum, a door that lets waves and winds, light and reveals dark, all the time, in & out, in and out. If we close the doors for long enough, we’ll have a build up of what I’m calling elements but are really abstractions of currents of moods, emotions, affects, intuitions, some that pass through us from our Selves and others from the World. I called it a door because its easier to start off acknowledging that ‘I’ am not the world around me, nor the other “I"s in the world. ‘I’ am never privy into the thoughts of strangers and friends, into the immense time and livelihood that goes behind each word that comes from a friend’s smile. Love opens the Heart to the realization that it doesn't feel alone; Hearts swim in a living world that feels with them, a network of affect, force, living tissue made of of Spirit over time that connects us to the hearts of all living beings, to the hearts we love but cannot see.

Reminder: write about Seeing with the Heart when Navigating the Mind

I have some more notes on affective vs intelligible imagination but I can't find them right now :)

The Artist's Escape

It’s often easier to face one’s truth from behind the veil of a story. As expressive, emotionally charged and cathartically poised the story seems to be, if the painful truth isn’t felt, we fail to face ourselves honestly, with determination and acknowledgement of where we stand. Starving artists will often hide their pain behind performances, and often hide from their pain behind performance, sometimes even dismiss the reality of the emotive performance as just that, a performance that tends to a public image and its corollaries. Artists may do anything to escape the ernest emergence of their truth through the art they create, and yet that’s all they believe themselves to be doing. Truth, the authentic and emotive expression of our being, is unavoidably a change in the world around us. All our truths are felt by the same Heart, the same pond we share on this side of the Milky Way, our Love, our Pain, these aren’t as secluded from the common Breath we all share as living beings as we’d like to believe.