And I met lots of people who were
suicidal because of that but also unwilling to take care of themselves, you know
because they were so guilty about who they were ... and their mode of being in the world that they just felt that
they weren't worth the damn trouble, you know, and,
well, and they all had their own particular reasons for believing that their own
failures, their own
improper sacrifices, let's say, their own acts of individual malevolence;
but they're summed up in a lovely metaphorical manner, a horrifying metaphorical manner, in those ancient stories and
those stories explain to us, too -
why as well that our consciences
don't sit well with us, and why we always feel that there's something undone that we should be doing in the world
which is a much better pathway to take, by the way, than to
degenerate into nihilism and
catastrophe and so
and that's really cool too - it's like
well, you should treat yourself
like you're someone responsible for helping and the first question is "Well, why don't you?" and the answer is -
well, there's a lot wrong with you
you know and
it's hard
to
exercise
enough
love and
care in a deep and non-naive way to care properly for
something like that
but, you know, you do it for people that you love, despite their inadequacies, and - there is this idea that
there is a spark of divinity within us and it is possible that
the fact that you have that spark of divinity (with you) within you
also means that you have the capability
to withstand
that terrible vulnerability;
that's what I was trying to get at in Chapter 1 - which was to stand up straight with your shoulders back that you could actually
voluntarily accept the onslaught of the tragedy of being and that you can
constrain the proclivity for malevolence that's part of you and that's part of the world, and in that - you can discover your own value,
your own intrinsic value in your own nobility and all of that might be more powerful than the forces of
vulnerability and malevolence themselves
which I also happen to believe and I think that that is in some sense the fundamental hallmark of faith
and so, Chapter 2
and, to some degree, Chapter 3 wishes to surround yourself with people who want the best for you is a
it's an encouragement to
assume, to act out the proposition that even if life is as
difficult as
it seems to be and if you're as vulnerable and
weak in a fundamental sense as you definitely are and
characterized by this terrible propensity for
the
infliction of voluntary suffering on yourself and others and that
destructive tendency that there's still something within you that's so
remarkable and so
aligned with
with
order and being in the proper manner that you can climb above that, let's say like Abel, and that you can make the proper
sacrifices and that you can set yourself right and you can set your family right
and you can set the world right and that the mere possibility
that that might occur, that that might be within the realm of
potential - means that you have a moral obligation to exercise the
responsibility to take care of yourself as if you're something that matters and that if you did that
properly - it might turn out that:
what you did would matter, that it would matter to you, that it would be meaningful in the way that things that matter are
meaningful and that it would matter to everyone around you