Dead ends and breakthroughs
I know of two friends of friends who are convicted child pornographers. Took pictures of their daughters and posted them on the Internet. They never come back, the pictures that you post on the Internet. The last thing I do before I go to bed is kiss my daughters goodnight. I often think of these two friends of friends. Almost always I think of another friend, not a child pornographer, who has a daughter who is particularly beautiful. When my daughters were first born, I thought about this friend: how can he do it? How can I do it? Dead ends. First, this thought path is a dead end, and second, such well-trodden dead ends are an answer to my question. (Related: grief[I owe you both more and less on that, sorry]).
Two nights ago I learned about logismoi, the Eastern Orthodox theological concept of "satanic" thoughts. Some dead ends, you wantto be dead ends. Every night I want to think about my friend, and my two friends of friends. And I want to go no further. I want that exact thought path to happen every night. God, I love my daughters. Leah's hand was barely hanging out under the rail of her bunk tonight. I almost took a picture for you, with my iPhone. But then I thought of my friend's friend, ... etc. Logismoi? Dead end.
Other dead ends you want to be breakthroughs. Business ideas. When my brain relaxes (Manhattan) I feel as if an understanding of the right business, the next business, one within my reach (grasp)—the understanding is right on the other side of a mental wall. I have reached a dead end. I can't break through it. I have to relax through it, ride (a wave [Spirit?]) through it. Of course, there is work beyond insight.
I feel this way about God, too. I feel as if God is on the other side of a mental wall from me. This I trace to the fundament of consciousness, distinction. Consciousness is a function, a process, the process of distinction. God is "underneath" this process. This is different than God of the gaps. This is saying that non-physical, non-mental realityis not essentially susceptible to our process, cognition, consciousness. It's below the stack trace, in the hardware, below even that.
(Kant: space/time + the "categories"enableexperience. [The categories—quality, quantity, modality, and relation—are Kant's suggested abstractions.] Space/time is not an external existant; space/time is a first-order mental construct that makes higher-order mental constructs, i.e., "experience," possible at all. Space/time is brainly hardwired. Getting "under" it is Buddhist-nirvana-land, where the person precisely doesn't exist anymore (precisely, more or less). So space/time is both necessary and non-absolute. It is so because necessity is necessity forsomething. A thing is necessary for what comes above on the stack, not for what comes below, nor because of what comes below. It is rather called forth by what comes above. Necessity is absolute fruitfulness. Space/time, e.g., is necessary forexperience. Why? Why should experience exist? Great question. The mental realm mirrors the spiritual realm? Dead end. Breakthrough?)
Spirituality is to live both a conscious life and a non-conscious life. (Words fail.) The Thing is the thing itself, a reality "below" consciousness, distinction. Pearl.
Miriam had a violin recital this evening. It was her second violin recital as a four-year-old, and her last: birthday next month. God, she was cute. Achingly. I ached. I could have taken a picture for you (me), with my iPhone. I didn't. I let the experience affect me as a katamari. This katamari-ness, this interpersonal level, this recognition of the absoluteness of unprocessed experience and the dissipation of something as one abstracts away from it—this is somehow the right direction. This is a dead end that I want to be a breakthrough. But (because the process, distinction, admits nothing else) the breakthrough is somehow life itself—"a life lived"—not and never abstractions, naked words—though at the same time words are never truly naked, they are themselvesspeech-acts. Dead end. Breakthrough?
