this-ness

"It is this that in days of yore was granted to us as our sustenance!"-for they shall be given something that will recall that past.

---Q:2:25

If the world is already so beautiful, Lord, if one looks at it with your peace within our eyes, what more can you give us in another life? With what other senses will you make me see this blue sky above the mountains, and the huge sea, and the sun which shines everywhere? Give me eternal peace in these senses and I shall wish for no other than this blue sky.

He who at no moment said 'Halt' save to that which brought him death, I do not understand him, Lord, I who would like to halt so many moments of each day to make them eternal within my heart.. . This world, be it as it may, so varied, so vast, so much of time, this earth, with all that grows in it, is my homeland, Lord , and could it not also be a heavenly home?

I am a man and my measure is human for all I can believe and hope: if my faith and hope remain here, will you blame me for it in the afterlife? Beyond me I see the sky and the stars, and there I should still want to be a man. If you have made things so beautiful to my eyes, if you have made my eyes and senses for them, why close them seeking another howl if for me there will be no other like this! I know you are, Lord, but where you are, who can tell? All that I see resembles you in me... Let me believe, then, that you are here.

---Maragall

Churchill, on hearing that Gandhi was in town again
said, apparently, "not that bloody fakir again!"

I guess we live in an age when "inwardness" and spirituality is the thing. Either that or the stark contrast of "brute reality" ; as if to say: we are nothing but thinking machines or matter in motion or little more than a bundle of swirling,unconscious, irrational desires. So much for the optimism of science!

In both there is a sort of renunciation of the world, the human world. The gnostic, no less than the materialist, 'thinks' of the world as 'mere extension'..thinks, doesn't see. For the hedonist, as for the ascetic/sufi, pleasure is deceptive, alluring, but never quite real.

Pleasure is the fundamental awareness of reality.
---Hannah.

In some sense, capitalism is not 'worldly' but, actually,a devouring of the world, of public spaces, beautiful appearances, to be replaced by the virtual world and inner feelings, the only thing that's real, authentic. The abstract, 'thin' self living in an abstract space, rather than this unique person, in this specific place, at this particular time.