Day 553: Love, Death, and Long Periods of Confusion

Day 553: 31 December 2022, Saturday

It is never too late to realize that now is the only opportunity to be free. There is no other time. Here we are. 

‘Either we are happy or we are not,’ one might think. Why not both? Nature is like… either/or, non/all, and… and… and… Everything presupposes its opposite: no-thing.

Happiness is far from an ultimate reward, but it is pretty good. Happiness is a symptom… of what? Joy, harmony, beauty, love, ecstasy, pleasure, and so on. Even pleasure, the most seductive of sensations, does not in itself cause happiness. Symptoms are variables, not outcomes. Affects, not effects…

What, then, is the ultimate reward? Do I want it, whatever it is? 

Who knows? But perhaps it’s simple, too, like the way the fruit ripens before it falls. The idea of a reward is presumptuous in itself, naive at the cost of the fall. We know that in creation there follows a fall, and it is this fall that brings about both ending and beginning. All separation, ignorance, and ecstasy are processes of production, produces of processes, one and the same, one love. 

‘Love is infallible; it has no errors, for all errors are the want of love.’ 

William Law

‘We can only love what we know, and we can never know completely what we do not love.’ 

Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, p. 81

Love is a war-machine…