Life Guards in the White Noise
Morning Thoughts #271
Orienting oneself. That which is good often speaks softly. The bad life screams at you, and thus tends to get your attention easily. What is good, what is evil? Satan was the most beautiful of the angels; evil is often that which glimmers brightest.
It is not as important, the immediate apprehension of ultimate good. The more pressing concern in the first stages is avoiding evil. The best direction? This takes time, usually many twists and turns. The fatal cliff, avoiding this when placed in a new environment, is the wise man’s initial primary concern.
What do you fail to digest almost immediately? With food, we trust our stomachs; they know what they cannot keep down, and you soon know it too. But this is true in other realms. What makes your spirit wretch? What almost naturally makes you sick to your human core?
Oh, what cultural maladies are you being asked to stomach? First, they numb you to beauty, to God, to the good. And then they feel you are prepared to be fed with the slop, your new, deeply held beliefs. Like a drug addict who no longer gets sick from a dose that once left him heaving, they have implanted the sickness deep within you and distracted you from the sick feeling itself.
Is sickness just a feeling? They convinve you of this, numbing the spirit until it feels nothing, until it can be persuaded to consume anything, and thus become closer to nothing. Empty importers.
To sum it up, what is evil speaks loudest. Turn away from that sound. The first task is diminishing that which drowns everything else out. Then comes the work of resuscitating the good, and finally, after enough searching, encountering the ultimate good itself, as though you had pulled it out of the sound and yet returned its voice.