Dispatches from The Equilibrium
By a stroke of luck
Joel Biroco | March 23, 2024 | Archive
Where do strokes of luck originate? Through its agency we wreck the gap between cause and effect. Though causality is unreal, nevertheless we side with it as the project of appearances. The phenomenon embraces it regardless of our antagonism to it, though most of course have hardly considered it and accept it blindly. The sleight-of-hand to create ‘effects’ attributes to what is already perfection our own little portion in creating it, the work of a breeze when the ghost of ourselves is blown away in a stronger gust. If we stop attributing to ourselves what is occurring on its own, to the extent that it can be said to occur at all, spying the underlying nothingness of everything, the desire to achieve something merges with a fine day of discovery that the absolute is happy to share the secret of our identity. There is plenty enough vigour left to consider the unreality of one’s very existence, holding it at sword-point until its dualistic differences cease to be wallowed in. The mirages pay back their debt on the hollow surface of things, one takes one’s sustenance from another dimension. Even those still hungering for things find themselves a living god, albeit a minor one. The true mystic pushes on, ignoring trifles such as this. If no people exist, what hope for living gods, though their sterility they breed.
The consummation of the ultimate reconciliation with the world is in the ambiguity of them. This never amounts to more than dwelling on paradise at the moment it begins to pall and the compromise of a lucky hell parades our attachments as if one had suddenly formed the temperament of detached nostalgia. Even the turmoil of that calling some distance away from any enthusiasm, more a matter of analysing one’s dispassion, as if a fall from grace supplied an opportunity to test out overlooked wings, only a little scorched at their tips. One rises from the ashes of someone else in mid-air, so to speak, familiar with the abyss. That perpetual test of our talents kills what we were, this obsession with the human that has molested the divine in religion.