Do you think it’s provisional living if you’re “preparing” for a life beyond? A life eternal? An eternity in each moment.
The best way to compartmentalize all of one’s impermanence seems to be the pendant of “we’ll get here again.” To lay down around our immortal golden footprints. Serving up breadcrumbs we’ll have Fate follow for every iteration hereafter. Maybe this is the third time?
If not here, then perhaps far out there, wherever. More like whenever. Gates of heaven right in front of you. Here or there is inconsequential with a parasitical mental tenant. Every day full of opportunities.
There’s something out there, don’t you think?
The flaw of the provisional life argument, to me, is how there’s nothing which’ll satiate other than your own self. You alone decide whether your “provisional living” is, in fact, apex living.
How else to live other than some solemn vows, vague visions forward – how else could one grasp the hand of our monk prior?
First of all he denies that happiness can be found by hedonism or utilitarianism (the “profit motive” of Mo Ti). The life of riches, ambition, pleasure, is in reality an intolerable servitude in which one “lives for what is always out of reach,” thirsting “for survival in the future” and “incapable of living in the present.”
Yes, perhaps we’ll never see Seoul. Nor the temples of Quetzalcoatl. But dipping one’s hands into the gravel of either scatters at first gust. Dust before and after. Could exist as some conversational seasoning, even though it’d be better to make the conversation a mutual memory – let’s forget that too. Cemeteries don’t have to be physical.
You’re here, I’m here, that’s the only thing I got in the notebook. Nothing else needed. You have it all and more, if you want to collapse this tesseral series – collapse into a meadow for every evening.
Instead of self-conscious cultivation of this good (which vanishes when we look at it and becomes intangible when we try to grasp it), we grow quietly in the humility of a simple, ordinary life, and this way is analogous (at least psychologically) to the Christian “life of faith.” It is more a matter of believing the good than of seeing it as the fruit of one’s effort.
Yeah, no Seoul nor Quetzalcoatl’s temples – but whether one sees it or not, goodness comes; it’s here.
Yeah, the provisional life argument starts with that supposition: there’s something to acquire. A “better” life.
But the only thing to grasp is that you already have it.