Please Hold While Bob Waits for Something More Important to Write About

Here's an excerpt from a letter by Schuon that reminds me of why I had to move on from psychology and begin the non-pursuit of Abiding on a full-timeless basis:

It often surprises me how deeply most men are sunk in phenomena, how much they identify themselves with their own everyday world of appearances, and how little strength of imagination they have...  

It goes without saying that this applies to the left -- to the Hysteria of the Moment -- but one often sees a variation of the same illusory identification in exoteric religiosity, which interests me not in the least. 

It no doubt has its reasons, since religion must meet man where he is, but for me it is as if such an approach is preemptively poisoned by that which it is here to help us transcend -- to what we "jokingly" refer to as the conspiracy. 

Both camps are tedious, but at least the latter types are mostly harmless.   

Is there really a conspiracy to distract us from reality? Good question. If you're a retard.

Schuon goes on to say that he noticed the phenomenon as a child, and while I don't mean to brag -- we'll see if Bob is entitled to boast as we proceed -- I perceived the same thing when I was a young 'un. Certainly by the age of nine, when I concluded that the world was mostly run by humorless Karens of both sexes. 

But the One Cosmos judges have determined that I have no right to brag, because in my case it was less owing to my being an unusually elevated and wise young man than to being a cynically unimpressed and disillusioned wise guy dominated by a profound sense of irony. 

In short, I thought almost everything was kind of stupid and pointless, especially things that concerned the Grown Ups. For which reason I vowed never to be one, and very nearly succeeded. 

This doesn't mean I was a nihilist. To the contrary, there were things that mattered very much to me -- too much, in fact. I've mentioned music and baseball. There was also... 

Well, there were other sports, because six months is a long time to go without baseball. Eventually there was reading, which I took up at the age of 23 or so. 

The other main pursuit is writing -- or this, whatever you want to call it -- which naturally leads to the question: why do I do it? What's the motivation? Why am I even writing and sharing this? Correct: to stay in shape while waiting for something more important to come along. In other words, I'm momentarily out of subjects.  

Now that I'm thinking about the past, there's the question of whether I actually rejected the Conspiracy or it me, certainly back when I was an adolescent. Today I would have the confidence -- or just the rudimentary common sense -- to be an outsider, but not then. 

Back then it was all an Overwhelming Mystery, and I wished the mystery would go away. In contrast, nowadays it's an Overwhelming Mystery, and that's just how Bob likes it: the more I know, the less I know, and that's fine. Abiding in the mystery. What else is there?

Correct: there is the question of whether the Dodgers will acquire Freddie Freeman, but I'm fine either way. The very purpose of a hobby is to pretend to care deeply about something that is ultimately of no consequence whatsoever. I'm not the type of person who riots when my team wins or loses. 

Conversely, music still seems "important" to me, the question being why. Off the top of my head I would say it is important insofar as it is audible spirit, a visitor from another realm. Otherwise to hell with it.

Back to Schuon's rumignosisses. With regard to most men being hypnotized by appearances, he again says that 

this surprised me even as a child insofar as I was capable of noticing it; I did notice it without any doubt, for otherwise I should not so often have felt myself to be as one standing outside, disinterested, as if I were an onlooker.

That's definitely part of it: standing outside, disinterested, as if an onlooker. Oh, I can pretend to be interested, otherwise I couldn't have been a psychologist for 30 years.  

I suppose Job One of the religious life is to shift one's fascination from the surface to the depth. Yes, that's it: to stay completely engaged, but with reality, not appearances. Is this too much to ask? 

At the moment -- this moment in man's history -- yes. It's an ongoing transformation, with the inevitable ups & downs, strikes and gutters, as we slowly adapt to the properly human world, which is obviously a divine-human world. But don't wait too long, for

Life: even if it is short, it is long; and even if it is long, it is short.

It is long because one day follows another, seemingly without end; it is short because it is only the dream of a night.

Yet this dream is all; it is all because it contains the seed of our Eternity (Schuon).

Bottom line for today:

Life is a dream, and to think of God is to awaken; it is to find Heaven already, here below (ibid.).

So, the rest of my day is set. Make that the rest of my life.