Infinitude: Part 1

Remember now that the body is only a circumference of the soul, by which it encircles and encloses an energy. This energy is what we ought to fall in love with, it is more valuable than the carcass (the mere flesh and bones) which caves our infinite delight. To find value only in the circumference is as if to buy a house that has four walls but no interior and to say, ‘ah this is where I will settle’. A bleak and cold winter it will be upon realising that the bricks are mottled and rotting within, that the fire is out and the embers adrift and that dust is the only resident that remains . Mostly in self-valorising we represent our vacuousness. Mostly in hatred we expose our sadness and our envy for it’s so incredibly easy to be cruel. It's so easy to be monstrous and so easy to indulge in the comfort of vanity. Perhaps we ought to be taught to step outside of ourselves (that tiny little cage of the ego) and to open our minds to infinitude. What is more beautiful than the infinite? We all seek infinity. Even if we seek to annihilate the self that is only because we long for the infinitude of death. So why not seek the infinity in life?

This can be achieved through feeling deeply and thinking deeply- by casting off that nasty little tendency to self-absorb; our cursed self-reflexivity that reflects only what we want to see. How about a different mirror today? A different angle? Not the angles we seek when we stare at our sullen faces in adoration on our phones with our selfies and our bodies and our silly little pointless poses. Elizabeth Bishop: the victory of capturing the Fish is letting it go. 'Until everything was Rainbow, rainbow, rainbow/ And so I let the fish go'. Spectrum and colour come from release; enclosure comes from self-seeking. A mighty paradox we must grasp; we must let the 'self' go and in doing so, find a bigger self; an infinite self.

How about a different mirror today?

Not the mirror that smiles back at you with your self-obsession. How about the mirror of the ‘inner’; the mirror that shows you what you really are under all that flesh and bone. Perhaps it’s time to address what restrains you and holds you in a grip. We, as a humanity, are so obsessed with bodies, sexologies, sex, sex, greed, avarices, mythologies, ologies this - ologies that - politics, time, maps, legalities and rules - why are we so obsessed with all which limits us? We have all fallen in love; why do we do that? Because it shatters rules, it shatters limits and fractures the legalities of structure - it is falling and how wonderful it is to fall against what tries to hold us in a fixed position. How can we access the infinite? Through feeling. Sympathy. Compassion. Not by showing off, not by bullying, not by alienating others just to find a sense of yourself because you are so fragmented that your only mode of making yourself whole is through the destruction or humiliation of others. What kind of humanity is that? We could be so good, so infinite, so brilliant and yet we choose to be so empty, so corrupt and so subsumed in all that means nothing for the only meaning we have is through how we care about and understand one another. The mind, not the body (as Blake says) provides us with eternal delight. Start using the mind.