five easy pieces

Never read more than you can live.
I can't remember where I read that but it's always sounded right. All those boffs with their dry-as-dust knowledge, those technicians of the spirit. Reading, thinking, not as a way of living but as a career, a way of creating a distance between you and the plebs, a way of appearing profound in a superficial world.

What would it be like to live through a thought? A thought that we could touch, that illuminated our whole being, not just our mind. For eye, mind, hand and heart to be one. A sound thought.


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Find your deepest instincts and then stick to them.
Nobility of soul is courage and the sublime virtue of trust. But isn't this given to us, a matter of grace? Who amongst us has the strength to live with mystery, to follow one's instincts trusting that things will work out, this animal repose? The bourgeois soul's love of security.


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Laugh at the whole world and the whole world will laugh at you.
Don't expect "success", don't think non-conformity is easy or complain too much that you are misunderstood. Don't expect other people to do anything but laugh at what you take seriously. "The world loves to blacken all that shines". Folly. Wisdom. Don't stop laughing-at yourself and others..and with others.



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Knowing isn't everything. "Pleasure is the fundamental awareness of reality".
Not a pleasure that loses itself in flights of imagination, but one that finds home, that is more rounded, at ease, proportional, one is tempted to say. Proportional to the good. Not the incessant compulsion to know everything. There are many things you do not know, that you will never know. It doesn't matter. Not this desire to dissect, analyse, calculate, break-up everything. But to accept the unknown, the hidden in one's life. To keep this sense of wonder that resists 'knowing'.

To understand that life is full of tragedy, farce, comedy, stoicism, good sense..that there is no 'ranking of rankings', there is no one thing. Well, maybe there is. But more than that. That life is full of blank spaces and that even the full ones also sometimes appear empty. And that that is truly a mystery. An acceptance, an awareness of what is given to us.


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Volo ut sis.
The supreme wisdom. The quintessential, the 'queen' that moves in all directions; the openness of the hand. A fundamental openness of our being, to others, to the world. If God judges us by appearances then another name for this dazzling freedom is Beauty. But no, more than this: it is the ability to say "yes", the pure desire for the beloved.