“Love can't flourish in a society based upon money and meaningless work: it requires complete economic as well as personal freedom, leisure time and the opportunity to engage in intensely absorbing, emotionally satisfying activities which, when shared with those you respect, lead to deep friendship. Our `society' provides practically no opportunity to engage in such activities.”

03/22/22 (lost source)

 “ and sometimes I don't, sometimes I walk right in. But often I fail to see the doorway open and streaming light before me, off on some mental fixation on resentment or politics or fantasy. Of all the thinking I've done in my life, and the mind runs constantly, very little of it was purposeful. The imaginary arguments I won against political or media figures, the Oscars acceptance speeches I've given, none of it helped me much. Distracted before the open gates of Heaven. Using Western Esoteric cosmology, the gates are the sphere of the fixed stars, past the spheres of the planets. The furthest planetary sphere is Saturn. Beyond the fixed stars of the firmament lies the Empyrean, the One, the Source, God. Despite saturn being the outermost limit of the planetary spheres, he is the densest and most material of the planets - structure, stability, imprisonment, death, fate, karma, intemperately cold and dry. Saturn is the first step into materiality - the point at which the Divine Mother gives birth to form. Saturn, as the highest planetary sphere, is the ruler of all the planetary spheres. Saturn is the demiurge, the Workman who manifests apparent phenomenal reality. But there is nothing out there - the spheres cannot be found with a telescope. They are layers of the self, and Saturn is the mind-behind-the-mind that creates the world we experience. Much New-Age belief and practice rests on the idea that "you create your own reality." But the you that creates is not the ego. The ego can mentally and ritually take certain actions in order to propitiate the demiurge without meeting it directly. In direct experience of the demiurge, there is a unification that can happen, where the sense of "I" drops back a layer to the "I" behind the "I", behind the curtain, turning the gears. That I listens to the ordinary ego I, and creates the world based on assumptions and impressions from the senses, emotional body, mind, imagination etc. That I makes up what is around the corner as you turn it, that I made up this post you are reading in order to teach you something. But ultimately that is the false light, the dim light. The true I, who is living you right now.
the I beyond all Is, that which looks out through all Is at all times, is the Source and Cause. Much of modern manifestation spirituality is essentially about making a deal with the demiurge - not even meeting let alone merging with it, but entering into a pact with Saturn where based on certain mental metaphysics the creator (lowercase c) will create that which the ego desires and takes action to "manifest." Then the ego takes responsibility for the creation - "I manifested it." The whole situation leaves out the Source. Part of the nature of Saturn is that we are all bound to death at some point - and in most traditions to endless rebirth and varying degrees of suffering. The sense that we are imprisoned here and must escape so that we're not reincarnated as a pig in a factory farm or child laborer in a Sulphur mine seems to leave out the Source as well. The gates of Heaven stand open before you. God wanted to love Herself. When my soul looked down and saw my own reflection in the waters of materiality I saw God, I fell in love and rushed forward into a body. Ultimately, if this is all a game the blipped into existence the moment I was born- it I / Saturn made up all of history and the concept of time and all of this will blip out of existence once more when I go, I still think the most interesting thing to do is try to be kind and love / reach for God. If I was assured that after a lifetime of striving towards Home and even uniting with the Beloved I would be reborn a pig in a factory farm it would still be worth it. "Burn down heaven and drown the fires of hell because only then will people worship God for God's sake." For fear of samsara and desire for nirvana, for countless neuroses and petty judgments, for mistaking the gears of the machine for its Creator, I have stood distracted before the open gates of Heaven.”

melancholia

 I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air…

The world was void,

The populous and the powerful – was a lump,

Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless –

A lump of death – a chaos of hard clay.

Byron – Darkness

”If the face of the earth were covered with lice as the sea-shore is covered with grains of sand, the human race would be destroyed, a prey to dreadful pain. What a sight! With me, motionless on my angel wings, in the air to contemplate it!

Comte de Lautréamont – Maldoror and Poems, translation by Paul Knight

The spectacle of man – what an emetic! Love – a duel of salivas… All the feelings milk their absolute from the misery of glands. Nobility is only in the negation of existence, in a smile that surveys annihilated landscapes (E.M. Cioran – A Short History of Decay, translation by Richard Howard.) 

, if death and love collide, we must hang on to our capacity for love until it transforms the power of death.