To The Reader: On Roots, Clarity, and Transmutation of Suffering

Dear Reader,

I often find myself thinking about you, even in my most stressful scenarios.

When I reflect on the things I wish for you, there is one ultimate desire above all:

I wish for you to find, or maintain, a fervor of love for life itself.

Can you imagine something more beautiful than to be rooted in the world around you, to find both equal parts peace and suffering against whatever is thrown to you? I certainly cannot.

I know some of you have faced immense trials and tribulations, things that no person should have endured. Without a doubt, surviving such things often are riddled with casualties that haunt you to this day. If you understand this idea, then I implore you to first find material stability and then to permit yourself to feel more than you think, for feeling often precedes thought. This is the path towards integration.

If you can, navigate these valleys with the help of others. You deserve an embodied life by virtue of your humanity.

In the interest of truth, the person that you should have been and the person you are now will never reconcile. The first instinct is to be bitter, so feel the painful contortion in your heart if you must. But recognize that you have not lost anything real, just an image of what should have been. What exists today is your reality. The full being of who you are today, marked by the affliction of the ghosts that haunt you, is worthy and deserving of a less painful life.

The start of the path to the embodied and examined life (in the socratic sense) is the realization that living is rare and surviving is not enough, and that you too are capable of something beyond yourself.

I am reminded of this quote from Weil, who, after a bout of consuming torment, stated:

After months of inner darkness, I suddenly had the everlasting conviction that any human being whatsoever, though practically devoid of natural gifts, can penetrate to the kingdom of truth reserved for genius, if only he longs for truth and perpetually concentrates all his attention upon its attainment.

It does not take a specific and rare character or set of unique skills to reach towards and touch truth, to make meaning from difficulty.

An extraordinary example of this is the life of Plotinus, a Roman Egyptian who founded the school of Neoplatonism. At 28 years old, which is much older than usual for his time, he began his study of philosophy to reach towards truth.

By the end of his life, through his toil and internal alignment towards clarity, created a cathedral of thought that radically influenced Christian and Sufi mysticism, Saint Augustine, and countless others.

He utilized one specific ability within each human to penetrate the kingdom of truth: a radical pursuit of truth as the highest good.

In our times, there are hardly philosophers of the true sense of the word, those who embody the pursuit of wisdom across their entire being. But the defining quality from Plotinus to Weil is simply that: the willing to live with their entire being towards their truth.

You too are capable of this. In this pursuit alone, you will have lived a life much closer to itself than otherwise.

I imagine you might say to me, "But everything today sucks! How am I supposed to have hope in this world?" You are, indeed, correct. Many things do suck, and let's catalog them:

Blatant corruption of our political system (at least they are being honest in plain sight now)
Personhood itself is considered contingent on state's rights in the dominant theories of American federalism
Wages have been stagnant for decades, and home prices have skyrocketed (material stability is the root of everything)
Connection is fragmented, and this is exacerbated by social media which we were never prepared for
Companies report record profits and lay off thousands of workers, and this somehow raises the stock price. Someone said it suggests streamlining, but doesn't it instead suggest incompetence from executive leadership?
Technology, the thing heralded as the democratizing savior of society, is destroying us from within

Well, that looks bleak doesn't it! But I must ask you: you are still here, are you not?

Life still has some pull on you, you somehow still have the capacity to endure, and something within you chooses to continue. Something within you wants to live.

Something I remind myself of constantly when I drive to the store is a simple fact: if you think you're at rock bottom, you haven't reached it yet. It can always, always, always get worse. I have learned this the hard way!

But if we are capable of penetrating the kingdom of truth, and something within us wants life, what the fuck are we to do other than struggle upwards?

The supernatural ability of Christian mysticism is the transmutation of suffering into meaning, which is why I write from that lens even though I am agnostic (well, I don't even know anymore). The greatest capability within us is to consent to suffering as it comes and transmute it into something higher.

I wish I had some transcendent thought to close this with, but I don't. I'm just a regular person struggling most days towards some truth, even though it often feels distant and obscured by fog. But I suppose I can close it with a simple summary:

I wish for you to feel rooted to this world and to find a deep love for life while you are still here
You are capable of penetrating the kingdom of truth reserved for genius through a radical alignment of your being towards clarity
Even if that means being in a dark world, you have the supernatural ability to transmute suffering into gold, to transcend the ghosts that haunt you
And from that, somehow, all shall be well (I return to this quote from Julian of Norwich constantly)

On an unrelated note, I implore you to find beauty in art. It touches something higher. From the crushing weight of affliction to the transcendent hope of grace, I find myself listening to Hamilton Leithauser's Isabella constantly (Andrew Bird's Danse Cribe is great too): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh6BXxt-i28

I find Vampire Weekend's Capricorn incredible when I am feeling crushed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOlG3ROXH2g