A note to readers

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 A special note to readers today.

 This particular post was written this morning, and not (like almost every other post in the space) weeks or even months in advance of its publication.

 This morning I had a rather intricate dream which I will not describe in detail. The essential point of it was that I was telling a group of people our body is made of very fine material.

Traditionally,  in many practices that aim to take us to some spiritually “higher” place, the body is seen as a rather coarse instrument: its senses crude and lustful, its cravings animal, the substances it excretes revolting. This is a rather intellectual and romantic formulation of a creation which has been painstakingly grown with extraordinary care by a set of creatures (molecular crystals) that have their own intentions, desires, and goals. Those impossibly tiny creatures are the foundation of our Being; and they operate at a level inscrutable to us, which contains in its entirety nothing but elements of the sacred.

What is more truly coarse is our intelligence and our appreciation of this body and what it is made of. These fine materials have the capacity to vibrate at rates we don’t understand and rarely come into contact with; yet they form what we are, and unless we begin with a deep respect for them, the place we come to in life is never enough to gain a real appreciation of what it consists of.

This should be pondered very carefully today as you go through your daily motions. We inhabit a sacred vessel which is composed of very fine material indeed; and we are to honor that as best we are able, not by some theoretical idea about it, some romantic notion, but a very careful, attentive, and intimate relationship with these fine materials we are composed of.

I’m tempted to go on, but I will just leave it at that.

I wanted to let readers interested in the treaties on metaphysical humanism know that the essay is by now very much longer than what has been published in this space. I’m taking a break from publishing it for a while, but I anticipate that sections of it will resume publication in January. Readers interested in diagrammatic models of the universe, especially those based on the enneagram, will be very satisfied with what is coming up. Those who find intellectual material of this kind ponderous will not. It’s difficult to balance the need for intelligent commentary on practice with the need for structural insight on philosophical and theological matters; I do what I can. There will always be those who are happy with it, and always those who will find it inadequate in one way or another. Thanks to those who enjoy the material, and my apologies to those who don’t.

It occurred to me that I almost never give readership updates on what’s going on personally. I just got back from a successful business trip to China, during which I felt more in touch with the finer vibrations of life than I often do. The family and children are doing well; sadly, our house is much smaller than it used to be because so many of our pets — who were for the most part acquired at the same time, some 16 years ago or so — have died in the last year or so, including (for readers who have been around long enough to remember her) the famous dog Isabel. Other notable losses have been Max, a foundling cat; Mr. Suzuki, a cat who was misidentified as female shortly after birth and went through most of his life being named Susan, even though we all knew he was male; Juliet, the reigning dowager of the family, a blue Persian who saw me through my divorce and went through a final round of heartbreaking feline senility before she finally died; and my mother’s cat Hortense, a feral rescue who spent the last week of her life with us while my mother was in rehabilitation.  

The loss of all these small but to us important lives has been sobering.

This brings me to the last note, which is that today marks my 37^th year of sobriety. Those who know me on Facebook can see the post I left there; but I wanted to say, in this space, thank you to all of those who supported me and loved me throughout the ordeal that was required for me to get sober.

Anyone who is struggling with drugs or alcohol is welcome to contact me if they feel they need some personal help in that matter.

People sometimes praise me for having been in recovery from alcoholism and drug abuse for so many years; but no praise is due. All I have ever done is try to meet my responsibilities as a human being, the first of which is not to behave in such an irresponsible manner. I’m grateful to God for the support that is been sent to me to keep me on the right track overall these decades; and I’m grateful to the people who were there to help me succeed, especially Rip, who is still alive, and Walter, who is not. I owe these two men a great deal which I can never repay.

 May God bless all of you.

Lee