Jan 14 – Spiritual (re-edited)

I.

Man, in and through the highest, most ineffable, and loftiest expressions that he is capable, always strives for the spiritual and immaterial, the motivations and ultimate “goals” of those actions, thoughts, and deeds that cannot be reduced to any known or accurately perceivable, thing save for the inexplicable joy and sublime satisfaction found in the irreducible pursuit itself. So too the gods, our objective counterparts in this unfoldment of life, both here and thereafter, who demonstrate their most ineffable expressions, by striving also for the physical and material, they who are most “godlike” when they deny and sacrifice their own inescapable objectivity for the subjective, bodily, and finite, just as man in his most “manly” denial of himself, his flesh, mind, hopes, and dreams of a material future pursues what is “worthless”, “counterproductive”, “asinine”, “impossible” and even economically and socially damning, the common ground of man and god which is found in the unpremeditated act of sacrifice and denial of that which one’s environs – through outward profession and inward conviction – emphatically proclaim as the most important, pressing, vital, and essential of all activities that one might engage, the condemnation of these invariable deceits which are always realized in one’s inability to grow, overcome, and transcend the presumed limitations of one’s place of origin, those which are, in truth, merely a suggestion and indeed should be seen as a challenge to do better by the willful, spiritual, and potentially powerful among us.

II.

The way to truth is always entered through the door of self-hatred. Hatred, of course, for who and what one persistently is as well as an insatiable desire to move beyond where one currently stands, and revolt against the ideas that one typically holds; the key to the aforementioned door which is initially felt in feelings of sadness, hopelessness, self-doubt, and later to self-deprecation and finally depression of various intensities and derivations which, if ignored, denied, drugged, or optimistically hoped-away, will inevitably return again and again in more and more ferocious fashion until one either places the key in the keyhole by accepting these self-deprecations as “true” (though impermanent) and pushes thereupon the door and embarks upon the path which only the lone individual can navigate and must lest he be forced to labor under the lies and self-deceits of and about the world and never thus learn to internalize the tragic unpleasantries of subjective life so at to continually forge the path to the beautiful, lofty, difficult and irresistible, that which we might call “Truth”.

III.

The primary interface and medium through and by which the objective world communicates with the subjective in the body of man (and indeed the entirety of the cosmos) is via “the gut”, that seat of lust and physical hunger as well as intuition and instinct, through soft and increasingly undeniable nuances and subtleties that are in no way aided by the sensual and later, intellectual capacities of reason and rationality but are, in fact, hindered and disfigured by such capacities which no doubt produce all manner of objection and refutation of and to said intuitions, primarily because such capacities had no hand in originating the intuitions and therefore rightly view them as foreign, irrational, unreasonable, and dangerous in light of the ever-pervasive empirical; realities that are everywhere present, unavoidable, and seemingly undeniable; intuitions which are both the ground and seed of faith: both the water and waterer of the seeds and later gardener of the conditions needed for growth and actualization whose fruit – according to the degree of beauty, power and even truth that its flowering might promise – might take an entire life to ripen so that it might be realized on the earth, the enjoyment of which, as described vaguely above, cannot be reduced to any other goal than that of the joy of the presence (-ing) of the thing-in-itself.

IV.

Therefore, only the spiritual man whose highest acts and deeds cannot be reduced to any known or obvious thing can be a man of “faith” and thus a vehicle for the fruits of God so that His objective “truths” to be realized for “what they are” on the earth, untainted by the vacillating wants, whims, and desires of the man who birthed them.

V.

Man is made in the image of God, and its glorious light is reflected to Him in all its resplendent wonder, even in light of his continual sin.

VI.

Man is a rosebush who, despite his thorns and the nobbled and gnarled cragginess of his stock and stem, and despite his frequent diseases, pests, and imperfections, nevertheless manages to produce a bloom that redeems all these defects, if only for a time. As such, in order to keep his internal constitution strong and the vigor of his potential growth robust so that his blooms may indeed continue to be redemptive, he must be pruned, deadheaded and his worthless deadwood forcibly removed, sometimes lightly and sometimes hard, as in autumn when the gardener cuts him down nearly to the stock, leaving only the strongest stems to last the winter; man himself who must also go through periods of fasting, deprivation, and austerity, sometimes light and sometimes hard so that in these testings he, too, is best protected against the pains and severity of winter, in whatever form it may take, so as again to bloom in spring. For Christ is our gardener, as it is written in the gospel of John 20:14-15.