"Success won't be Enough"
Winning and enjoying worldly success will never fill your heart.
From the start, we are taught in school to memorize formulas/rules that are totally arbitrary in comparison to nature. We are forced early on to work and deal with abstractions. We might count this as the first betrayal of our own soul and nature. We take what is arbitrary to be real, to be the essence of nature -- to be Law, even. But really, it's simply a creation of the collective...an agreed upon convenience. A happy mirage of control, even.
There are many conveniences that humanity has collectively created and enforced upon us/you/me. One of the ugliest is the notion that we must become some grand thing to be accepted by others. You must have something to offer your fellow humans in the capitalist arrangement, otherwise, you simply aren’t worthy of belonging. There is something out there that you must find and conquer before you can be accepted or loved. Ideally, you should wield some sort of worldly power.
And this idea is both exhilarating and exhausting. Why can’t I be loved as I am? Why must I prove myself and to whom? And so we dive head first in this quest to prove ourselves. But these motivations, thoughts, and perhaps even duties, do not spring out of thin air. They are constructions handed down to us. They are offered to us at an early age as truths or wisdoms.
And having denied our own sensibilities and insights at such a young age, we cannot help but to adopt the collective’s agreed upon abstractions about who we are and the nature of the things. We are quickly barred from allowing our own truth and essence to make an appearance. And so we quickly join the chorus, that is both respected and adored by the collective, in hopes of finding rhythm or harmony with those already singing a familiar tune. In joining the chorus, we forget our own song. And we learn the sounds/abstractions/wisdoms of others. In essence, we lock ourselves out of our own Home.
And in the end, we are left with a head full of cute jingles and abstractions that don’t help us make heads or tails of life. In moments of despair, the best the choir can do is simply to tell you: just keep singing. But you can't, you've lost the feel for our own destiny. Which is to say our life has become stale. You have no true direction. And no way of knowing whether you have made a decision rightly...I know because I’ve both sung another’s tune and felt the desperation of not knowing how I got started on a foreign tune in the first place.
So how do we step out of this dilemma? By leaving the playhouse; by walking off-stage mid theatrical performance. By re-learning everything you were taught from first principles. And the first principle, the first motivation, was never to be “successful” for success' sake. It is and has always has been for love. You wanted to impress the girl. You wanted the guy to notice you. We are in search of love. A love that burns down the need for so many abstractions. We want true experiences, not symbols representing or approximating truth.
There is no need for stepping into the world of abstractions once love is alive in the heart. Because love is the first principle that brings everything significance. Absent that love, there is no amount of formulas, words, numbers that could express reality to you in a meaningful way. Mental abstractions only increase disorientation. Love speaks a universal language that goes beyond symbols.
And so I finish, errr this sermon, by asking why is it that so many of us have something to prove? Maybe, when we stop trying to prove ourselves a new force begins to grab hold of us. The force of true experience...of love. Truth and love are synonymous once we’ve begun to see clearly. Sending you all LOVE.
--Daemon