16.

Gruel is a very calming food, especially chewed. It’s a bit harder to get out of bed for though, than for instance coffee. It struck me that it wasn’t just as a stimulant that coffee was an effective drug for the working part, but relatedly through its addictive nature: the physical dependency itself pulls you out of bed, gives you something to look forward to whatever else the day may hold. It is not so with gruel. It is hard to look forward to what may be better for you, body & soul, at least to begin with. There are those who would shun such an attitude, as parts of me would, but once we get beyond the easily pleased perhaps there is a kind of pleasure in it all. Satisfaction, such as one gets when one is meditating well: it feels such a perfectly right & fitting thing to do, as if such are the steady points upon which rests all that is at rest in the world. & yet at its heart is a truth it is impossible to want to hear, likely it is only really our suffering that ever drives us to listen to it. It seems a massive overreaction, as if reality got a little bit irritating so we just got rid of the whole thing. It’s still there but it’s all illusion, mere appearances. What’s the point of getting upset about a bunch of mere appearances? To realise the truth I suppose, without which there is no sense to anything, no matter how hard you cling to all the stories in which there oh so clearly is.

I have seen clever western people laugh off the essence of this truth, for instance holding up an old story about a warrior who achieves enlightenment on the battlefield, realising the great illusion as their sword carves through flesh, the implication being that if it is all appearance then there is nothing to stop you chopping or smashing or blowing it all up. I too have struggled to see where morality gets a foothold in such a philosophy but it isn’t an intellectual truth, for the simple fact that if real freedom happens to you then existence becomes unspeakably precious. One of my favourite terms for it is Wondrous Existence, of course the essence of what is so wondrous about it is that it does not exist. This is what Beauty means to me, so it really is in the eye of the beholder, but unsubjectively, & only if that eye is beholden to no-one.

I think it makes most sense to the west in the language of Love. Can you be forced to love something or someone & still have that be love? If you can deeply understand freedom as part of the condition for true love you can see how the truest love comes only when you are no longer a victim of your own existence. Then it is pure love & there is no jealousy, no addiction. It isn’t the same love that in different hands or eyes is hate & any act that flows from it will be good. Good.

That’s the idea anyway & the sooner we realise the sense of its nature the sooner we start out on the path from which any real hope must branch.