The Terror, part I

The search for a path through life

Photo: Garter snake on the beach. Isleboro Island, Maine

What is the real point of self observation?

In the first place, one already discovers it’s very difficult. If I'm not present, no real self observation can take place; and yet I'm almost always not present, so if there is any, actual self observation is like a flickering light that rarely and briefly connects to the necessary current, illuminating some aspect of my character.

More often than not, my reaction is that whatever I saw is bad. And, as a matter of fact, it probably is, because almost all of the manifestations I engage in, when I’m not connected to the love that forms Being, are evil in one way or another.

Fortunately for all of us, evil is petty and small in the first place, so most of our evils are petty and small. The ultimate issue is that so many little evils make one big evil, and this is probably the root of the doctrine in the Catholic and other Christian churches that we’re essentially sinful. One can, of course, perhaps blame Saint Augustine for rooting this doctrine at the base of the church teachings, but whatever. It’s ultimately founded in facts about our sleep and mechanical nature—so don't blame him. At least not entirely.

The little light flickers on, and I see myself. But I don't see much. And it takes many years of effort, of trying to come back to myself, to develop any effective sense of self observation. To make matters more complicated, I can’t truly enter a state of real presence without my sensation becoming very active indeed—so active that it forms a new intelligence in me: and this point is not just obscure, it’s impossible to convey using average words, because the energetic state that it imparts to Being comes from a level that the usual words don’t address or function on. The words belong to intellect, which comes from a different world than sensation. All one can do is indicate there is a different world.

But "something else" in Being has to get on the aircraft that goes to that different world, because it’s a whole continent apart from intellectual activity—separated by an ocean.