The Three Difficulties

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In many ways, the path will seek to confuse you.

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If it is worthy. If you have found it with difficulty, with fits and starts, if you have lost it and then regained it. 

If the you feel it as a thing with thorns and nectar.

If, when you are sleeping, the path calls to you.

If it is not a thing chosen, but something which cannot be denied.

If you curse it.

If you bless it.

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It is a thing unto itself, but without you, it is only a way in the woods.

Nothing more.

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I have been struggling with this concept of the limitedness of perspective, of our human perspective, and how crippling it is. When I was in high school I remember studying Drosophila Melanogaster and thinking about their truncated life cycles and how odd it must be to be born in the morning and be dead twenty-four hours later. If it is raining that day, then it has always been raining and always will be. If dry, dry. If sunny. If windy. Cold. Humid. If an earthquake. If an eclipse. 

How limited.

At forty-three, I am starting to figure out that my life cycle is not really any longer. Certainly no more significant. And this is not to say that the life of a fruit fly is insignificant. Nor my life. 

Just that it is terrifically limited.

I'm reading this book by Michio Kaku on the physics of multi-dimensional universes- four, six, ten, etc. Mathematically it makes some sense, but you can't really get an intuitive grasp of it. It does illustrate, however, the point that the universe seems to be intent on making a big show of for me right now, and that is that WE JUST DON'T GET IT.

Why is this?

Well, for one, its because of this whole limited perspective. Short life span, so geological processes take generations and generations to figure out, and even then we don't really believe them because they take so damn long to happen. Never mind the cosmological. I mean, fuck. Gimme a break. Only a fraction of the light spectrum is visible to us. And everything, everything has to be in-processed by a five channel system that is designed to filter out probably eighty or ninety percent of the available data, which it then flips upside down, or interpolates, or transforms into electrical or chemical data because, face it, if we got it pure and unadulterated we would be, what, gazing at the naked face of god and be turned into a pillar of salt just like Lot's wife.

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But there are guys like Einstein and Feynman and all those sharp-minded motherfuckers who can taste a crumb or look at a little broken off piece of something and see the eight-layer wedding cake or the giant cathedral from which it came.

Fucking miracle, that.

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Ah, but the path doesn't care about all of that. The path will lead you to where you are destined, in a day or in eighty years or in ten or in ten thousand. 

Perhaps it is the same for all of us. Despite the surface variations. 

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Today I am grateful for my small intellect and my medium-large heart and, as always, for my strong back and strong arms for as long as they last. 

Despite the gifts you give me, I am hungry always for more. 

Grateful, but hungry.

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Seems a good way to move down the path.

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Namaste.

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