Dec 05 2010

Everything’s Falling Apart: Moksha Revisited


Everything’s going to get worse in time, because as you know, it does!

We all fall apart in the end.

Everything falls apart, institutions, buildings, nations, it all crumbles.

…

I would rather say that the people who have hope in the future are the miserable people, because they’re like donkeys chasing carrots dangled before their noses from sticks attached to their collars.

And they pursue and they pursue in vain, always hoping that tomorrow will be the great thing. And therefore incapable of enjoying themselves today.

People who live for the future never get there, because when their plans mature, they are not there to enjoy them.

…

The whole idea you see is, everything’s falling apart! So don’t try and stop it!

When you’re falling off a precipice it doesn’t do you any good to hang on to a rock that’s falling with you!

This is another case of our completely wasting our energy, in trying to prevent the world from falling apart!

Don’t do it! And then you’ll be able to do something!

— Watts

Chattering finch and water-fly

Are not merrier than I

Here among the flowers I lie

Laughing everlastingly

No: I may not tell the best

Surely, friends, I could have guessed

Death was but the good king’s jest

It was hid so carefully

— G.K. Chesterton



10 comments

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    • Edger on September 3, 2010 at 20:00
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    “There is no need to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked, it can’t do otherwise, in raptures it will writhe before you.”

    — Franz Kafka

  2. and it always bends toward collapse.

    What new order will rise from the ashes?

  3. Yes, everything falls apart.  And we lose everything: friends, love, children, life, the whole thing goes away.  Hope may be stupid, but the fact of impermanence doesn’t mean that you don’t fill every second with whatever joy, love, gift, enjoyment, gratitude and honoring you can muster.  Alan Watts shouldn’t be misunderstood.  It’s not nihilism.  It’s that the way one deals with impermanence is to fill the minutes with good stuff, knowing that too soon it will all be gone.

    The impermanence is the truth.  As the buddha said, “From interdependent causes all things arise, and then fade away.”  The fade away part is the impermanence.  The important part of this, which nobody can do anything about, is to make each second count.

    Sorry to preach.

  4. to be an active agent of the fall.

  5. I’d like to follow up on that, but I can’t. I have no idea where it would take me. Probably nowhere.  

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