Thick clouds in the sky

Continuous stream of consciousness. The entire world in the blink of a single ksana. Being continually reborn, every single moment, the next the next and the next moment, carrying on the karma of past births. Dying and being reborn repeatedly, an entire cycle of human life in a single drop of ksana. The life you hold so dear is in your hand, the world is in your hand. Universal consciousness and everything there is is exactly here, where and when you perceive it. The world unfolds and unleashes at your perception. Relinquishing, learning to relinquish all of accumulated karma - the goal of perception and human life.

Thick clouds in the sky. Empty streets. The smell of morning air. All the plans that I have, all the dot points I have on the white board. All the ambition, all the goals, and all the future I have crafted for myself. As I take a minute to start my day, I wonder if I should care. I mainly pursue goals not mainly because of ambition, but to run away from the ghost of the past, that which causes pains and inspires fear inside of me. In the absence of fear and judgement, acceptance and contentment in their stead, all my ideals seem to be irrelevant. Pursuing ambition is not an encouragement, it is a necessity, because I have fear by my side, constantly reminding me of the failure that I could be, the judgement that I could receive from myself if I don’t earn everything with honour, and live in abundance instead of sickness and poverty, things that only remind me of what I cannot do - my mere mortality. I dream often of forsaking responsibility towards myself, of somehow removing myself from this necessity, by abandoning social expectation, self-expectation, and embracing a core self-ish moral value. Perhaps, what I am most afraid of is indeed not being of social utility. But social utility is a troubling concept: one can be looked up to, like a general, and hence be of social utility, but one can also be looked down on, like a serf, a servant, or a slave, and also hence be of social utility. As long as one makes oneself available to others socially, then one is of social utility. There is however a difference, and that is in vulnerability and power. The general is not vulnerable and powerful, the servant is vulnerable and powerless. The general can bend things, and the servant can be bent. That is the difference. When you are a general, what is good is to enforce justice, but when you are a servant, what is good is to serve under a just lord. For a general, the difficulty is in the enforcement of justice, for the servant, the difficulty is in finding and serving a just lord - the general is always in control of his life, the servant is not always in control. But to be fair, we are always never strictly just a general, or a servant. There is no absolute authority, and absolute servitude in life. We are always in a position of relativity - in servitude towards certain person or people, and in positions of authority towards other person or people, this is the way of life that cannot be violated. We are in control of our lives, and we can decide to some extent where we end up, but no matter the position, we will always be in a position of relativity, and not that of absoluteness. Those who have peace in their lives are those who are accepting towards where they end up in life, by pure fortune and ordinary effort. Those who do not have peace in their lives are those who are unaccepting towards where they end up in life. These people continuously try to fight against the current, in pursuit of some ideals that they have been captured by, of which happiness they believe will give them totality. They too do not dream of the position of absoluteness, but they believe in incremental measurable increasable effort that will put them in their ideal place. But even significant effort produces the distinction between those who accept and those who refuse to accept their results. Hard work and concentration can only get you so far, going beyond that limit, and your own everyday happiness is at perils, as you have repeatedly transform your entire life into a perfectionist workaholic factory-style machine, all for the pure purpose of achieving the ideal position in life.

Acceptance, in the same way that social utility is troubling, is also a contradictory concept. Too little of it, and you are in self-denial of your need and desire - the basic animalistic instincts of territorial control, resource possession, and reproduction. Too much of it, and you continually chase an ideal as your life falls a part as a machine-becoming human. I wish there was an ordinary answer to acceptance, in the same way that the idea of ordinary effort makes sense. But there is no such thing, acceptance is multi-layered and convoluted, perhaps the most convoluted out of all human understanding and existence. Our lives revolve around meaning and all the baggage that comes with it, as much as it revolves around happiness, and ACCEPTANCE. Acceptance is not simple. The demonstration of it is not in words, but in resolution. Sometimes we say to ourselves that we have accepted something, but we have not at all accepted it. Sometimes, we can only accept something, after not accepting it - only forgiving someone only after acknowledging all the pain they have caused. Acceptance is to embrace life, to accept life in its totality, that is why it is troubling - because it is difficult of us mere mortals to be satisfactory with our limited existence when facing that which is infinite. Our limitation reminds us of the absence of existence, of the absence of us. But why do we have to enforce our way in the world, why do we have to have anything in our way at all. Why do we have to care about totality, and infinity, and life. We don’t need to give a shit about anything, we just need to give a shit about our lives, about what we can do, about what we can change, about what’s immediate in our lives, and sometimes that means forgoing thinking too deeply about the future, or even the past, or even the present. If we look deep enough into any conscious space, there will always be a mark of imperfection, something itchy to scratch, something to be unsatisfied or irritated with. To contend ourselves with what’s relevant, that is acceptance. Disregarding everything else, even if they do matter if you can plan ahead that far, that is giving a shit about the fate of the universe, which you never should.