YOU CAN’T REMOVE STARS FROM THE SKY AND EXPECT IT TO SHINE AS BRIGHT.
Keep it in mind before your cut that good person away, that good thing. Before you betray someone, before you hurt someone, before you steal something, before you lie to someone or yourself, before you destroy that which is good, before you betray yourself and your better convictions.
There is this sick rhetoric in our world often recited by bargain basement psychology – just forget, just let go, just live in the moment. It’s the philosophy of YOLO psychopaths who don’t believe in and don’t worry about having a soul or the implications of their actions/and karma. To the sociopathic mind having a soul is a burden in the way of the present moment’s impulses and gratifications. It turns the soul into an enemy, it is hostile toward soul, because soul dares to challenge the lowest self’s impulsive lifestyle even if that lifestyle is self destructive.
If you’re leaving your heart and soul behind to “move on” and “live in the moment” for your ego, you’re not really moving forward. It’s self limitation, like starving oneself, and it gets more painful and painful. So greater and greater distraction is needed for the ego to stave off the existential gnawing.
Darkening the sky, limiting the scope of your world, just so the lower self, the ego, can have what it wants today is more akin to self murder than it is living a healthy life. It’s not that we can’t have gratification and even materialistic things, how we get there matters though. How we attain them matters. Our perspectives on them matters. Our senses of proportion and our values matter.
I know for me I will never leave my conscience and convictions behind, nor my soul behind, nor my heart. Those who are willing to leave such at the door so they can get ahead are already ghosts in the matrix and don’t realize it yet.
Having a soul is like having land to make a garden with. It can take work to till and prepare it, to maintain and cultivate it. It’s not easy and honestly higher soul growth requires ego sacrifice. The rewards however are sublime and great. People will say “this and that” is how you know God, worship this and that, give praise to this and that, obey this and that… and yet the means are already within us. The means aren’t always easy, cultivating that garden, but it’s there. No one can take yours away from you except you.
EGO is the only thing that should be sacrificed. If one is sacrificing their heart and soul, or worse other peoples’ hearts and souls, one is doing something very wrong. Whatever “self help” gurus are telling you that you can live untethered and unburdened from the weight and responsibility of your human beingness, throw those teachings out and instead pick up a good gardening book. In fact pick up a gardening book that teaches you how to garden in the worst and rockiest conditions. Find the teachers that teach you how to get in touch with the core of your garden and your own being. How to struggle through tough conditions. How to cultivate a seed and never give up. How to love a garden unconditionally when it would be easier to abandon it. God doesn’t abandon us when we are at our rockiest and worst, so take that as inspiration to show the same love for your own garden.
The sky is only bright because of all the stars in it. The present moment is not a myopic slice of time. The present stretches into the past and the future. The most painful agonizing things us human beings do and allow to be done to us is try to crush the expansiveness of that moment, of consciousness itself, of our souls into some myopic slice.
No thank you. I’ll keep my soul, even my karma and the parts of myself that feel heavy and a burden to deal with, because they are ME. They are my garden. They are my inner kingdom.
I’ll till it, and I’ll care for it, I’ll love and maintain it, and I’ll open it to the stars above, and I’ll realize that it’s always stood amongst them. They were just waiting for me to catch up.
As for the pleasures of life? The thing that YOLO quotes focus on? The fruits my authentically loved and grown garden produces will be sweeter and more fulfilling than anything that could be attained in any other way.
The secret to happiness is to honor your garden, honor the stars in the sky. Honor what came before and what has yet to have its time under the sun. There is no such thing as a myopic moment, everything is happening and existing all at once.
