"...fuck being a dirty word that comes out clean" -Jack Kerouac

I'm wired and tired, so I'll write tonight. This post has very little to do with the title, although old Jack's work definitely influences some of these thoughts, but I maintain that I am not a Zen Buddhist.

I mentioned the notion of cyclical development and the two opposite ways it could be understood. I will ellucidate some of my thoughts on this topic.

Do you ever feel as if your life has been spent learning the same lesson over and over? Do you feel as if in every aspect of your life you consistantly make the same mistake? Perhaps this leaves you with feelings of futility or wretchedness? Deep down beyond the self-inflated humanistic veneer, do you feel like a worthless piece of human excriment. To quote Palaniuk "you are not a unique butterfly, you are a steaming refuse heap"...or something to that regard. This is certainly how I feel. It is very easy to fall into a mindset of furious desperation from this seemingly futile cycle, but I would ask you, to revalue this as well.

Think not that the cycle is on a flat surface, do not confine yourself to the ground. Rather, see that the cycle rises above the ground as it cycles around. Everytime you feel as if you are regressing in life, or failing, you are still on an upward spiral of self-actualization...I am not getting into that, I barely understand it.

What implications does this have for life? Are not self-destruction, loss, futility, darkness and confusion then the necessary negative aspects of positive advancement? As the Jewish poem goes...

"Why, oh why did the soul plunge
From the upmost heights
To the lowest depths?
The seed of redemption
Is contained within the fall."

The seed must fall from the farmer's hand to die within the earth. Once it dies, a plant is resurrected from the ground.
Destruction begets creation.
Death brings life.
Depression summons happiness.
Darkness calls light.
We must grasp the nothing, understand our negation to truly find who and what we are. Teenage depression should not lead to suicide, bitterness, non-conformity and then chastized and unsatisfied conformity at the 20 something age. It should bring about self-awareness, understanding, a self that is not satisfied to sit in a cubicle. It is when we treat depression like a disease to be medicated or talked away we must realise that it is a necessary part of our upward cycle to understanding. Then and only then can we free ourselves from the insane world in which we live. We simply must not remain on the first level of the cycle, we must allow ourselves to be elevated to other levels of being. We must spend our time struggling with our own consciousness, grappling with ourselves in intense thought thinking thought. Do not forget the aspirations of your youth, dream on, as it were, musicians and poets say this all the time. Do not confine yourself to mere physical survival. We cannot fail at being unless we refuse to move, refuse to deal with the negative and sit contentedly throughout our physical lives on our spiritual and mental asses. I digress...

The question yet remains, can we spiral down the cycle, is a reversal of being possible? Can we unbecome, or lose our development? But then again maybe there is no difference between up and down, maybe the beginning is the end, and whichever way you go, the cycle will lead you on and on, up and up to a pinnacle that cannot be defined and which never stops moving. Eternity...imagine a static plane, that is stagnation, refusal to develop. Now picture two spirals leading in opposite directions from that plane, one up the other down. (I believe a friend gave me this image a year ago and it only now makes sense) See those spirals coil around and meet in a circle. Now see each spiral as a coil of infinite other spirals, and those spirals are each composed of infinite spirals ad infinitum. The beginning is the end and it is endless. This is the entirety of existence, this is all that IS, this is eternity, inifinity, Yahweh, of which we are a part?

This is all getting rather out of hand and I am sure that I am contradicting myself, but really I am not trying to prove anything, just trying to fathom the unfathomable...