The story of every living thing that ever was or will be ends with a phrase something like the title of this rambling bit of heartbreak and hiccup. Here today… gone tomorrow. It is my understanding that, by the end of this month, the earth’s population will hit 7 Billion. I don’t think anybody can really grasp what seven billion of anything is. Seven billion pickles, seven billion tuna fish is just not knowable in any real sense. It makes me wonder how many people there have been since day one. His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama says prayers every day for everybody in the hope that all the sentient beings that ever were will find enlightenment.
How many individual centers of the universe have made the dust to dust round trip, wide eyed and hard wired self-certain of their own importance? It doesn’t appear to stager the Lama’s imagination, but, it sure does a job on mine.
Understanding that we don’t see things how they are… We see things how we are… is something that I need reminding of constantly. It’s a shocking bit of understanding, and keeping it foremost in view is like never getting off a roller-coaster of input that you ride alone. It gets old. One tires of the isolation. That is where gravity comes from. The gravitational force has no choice, in a universe such as ours, but to become manifest.
For the artistic individual has lived in art-creation instead of actual life, letting his work live or die on its own account, and has never wholly surrendered himself to life.
In place of his own self the artist puts his objectified ego into his work, but though he does not save his subjective mortal ego from death, he yet withdraws himself from real life.
And the creative type who can renounce this protection by art and can devote his whole creative force to life and the formation of life will be the first representative of the new human type, and in return for this renunciation will enjoy, in personality-creation and expression, a greater happiness. [Otto Rank]
Mrs. Neutron's Garage 