My good friend Balckwell,
Recently read through your Heaven & Good Things which I thank you for. Taking time to go through each thought line is something admirable – here’s to hoping at least a meagre extension won’t be unwelcomed. No reply necessary, nor thoughts to pull out more. This is just an inclination to write, however thorough it won’t be, dilettante and meandering.
It’s interesting how heaven converges across the straits, doesn’t it? As you written with “zen” or let’s introduce a more guru-centric staple, “a personalized journey to inner peace, clarity, & wellness. Try Transcendental Meditation (TM)® Today.” Satori is another term lent with some fondness.
You’ve laid out the crux of the human condition which Heaven could hope to solve: doership. But what was interesting was completely owning up to it – of course one shall forever want doership in all things, how else will the story chug along? Is doership something to solve?
In a different reflection, one may see doership as our original sin – ultimately tragic. Condemned to be free. All man’s problems. A good favorite depiction would be falling out of love until absence is the only recourse. The boredom monster mangles up and out any eternal ever-after, even for the most devout.
We’re beautiful because we’re doomed
Because any moment may be our last.
You will never be as lovely as you are now
And we will never be here again.
The hedonic treadmill greets us all kindly and indifferently, maybe a little smugly – the same smugness found in those roaming Heaven in your examples, you could suppose. The bars shall close, the dorms did rot, and the bridge will collapse into the dwindled river-side for the abandoned village. One could suggest that our ephemerality nestles nicely against thoughts about Heaven. It’s the instigator after all. One may find such things unavoidable with enough melting of days and those around you.
When one internalizes the chimera dancing about and around you – plucking out memories for a daze – so again a different reflection could contort it all melancholic and matter-of-fact. How, instead of being thankful it happened, one could pan the camera toward the endless steps ahead. With all of these faces in front of me, for however many a day remaining, what ash shall comfort our end? Maybe one learns to love the torch to flicker until soot upon the cobbled wall. It’s your stairwell after all – steps that construct the rest of your existence, however long you want to define it.
Still, it’s not so foreign to wonder where can a persistent warming flame be found. Spending enough moments one may very well wish for refuge against all dimming light. Well, zooming out toward our shared moon one could observe the cities brighten every evening. Maybe we could zoom into Hong Kong arcades today, and wonder how many passer-bys shall put in their last coin that day. The metal shutters of a 3 a.m. roam never feels as ominous as it does when you wonder if it’s permanent.
Doership leads to all of these uncomfortable states. Only when one is on their knees staring down the steps ahead could Heaven lend a shawl, however coarse and foreign it feels. Letting the shawl take away all burden of “progress” ahead, float down the steps through its flow.
On the other hand one may certainly double-down on Experience and collect more. Still, you’ll likely reach the point of wondering if you’ve already experienced all the intensities one could hope for. Condemned to subsist off memories which poke as canker sores. A pendant about one’s “golden days” forever as contrast.
Heaven as the afterlife and afterlife only is certainly some salve against the cracked lips of one’s descent. As a reward, it certainly is puzzling… maybe of mild comfort.
But instead I would want to direct you to the ails today, that one could solve. Doership as the parasite which leaves one unsteadily and delusively sustaining some idea you’ve control over some aspects of living, and yet what a burden it may be!
Instead I would hope that Heaven is accessible today: letting go, no more doership at all, nothing else needed.
Yeah, we are the Morning Star’s dust, and stardust we can hope to be.