Reflections: A Random Note

The following was found on my computer table at home, scribbled in pencil on a note card, undated other than by my given age:

I am 72 years old and have reached a place where I know I am going to die. This expectation of death is no longer just an intellectual concession -- it is a gut certainty. It is also a visible and sensual physical perception; somatic, emotional, and on a persistent, conscious, mental loop.

Nice place to be, huh?

Reflections: Who Was It That Died?

I'm like a ghost, haunting my own space.

Reflections: Existence, a Tough Place to Be

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Nobody ever does what they say they're going to do, except by coincidence. All human action is motivated by forces the actors choose either to deny or to ignore. To awaken to this is to know existential nausea. To overcome it is to know enlightenment.
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Reflections: The Here and the Now

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I find myself more and more defined by a disciplined set of routines which constitute a kind of de facto asceticism. As a result, I find it increasingly difficult to do anything I don't considered to be necessary.
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Reflections: BUSTED!

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Sitting alone in my new apartment, to which I was driven by the dissolution of my third marriage, wondering vaguely in the pain of separation why it is that I can’t seem to make it with anybody—all three of my wives left me; two of them after a considerable number of years—even though I seem to be trying, I came across the following excerpt on page 78 of a book club edition of Philip K. Dick’s novel, Valis:

 

In his study of the form that masochism takes in modern man, Theodor Reik puts forth an interesting view. Masochism is more widespread than we realize because it takes an attenuated form. The basic dynamism is as follows: a human being sees something bad which is coming as inevitable. There is no way he can halt the process; he is helpless. This sense of helplessness generates a need to gain some control over the impending pain—any kind of control will do. This makes sense; the subjective feeling of helplessness is more painful than the impending misery. So the person seizes control over the situation in the only way open to him; he connives to bring on the impending misery; he hastens it. This activity on his part promotes the false impression that he enjoys pain. Not so. It is simply that he cannot any longer endure the helplessness or the supposed helplessness. But in the process of gaining control over the inevitable misery he becomes, automatically, anhedonic (which means being unable or unwilling to enjoy pleasure). Anhedonia sets in stealthily. Over the years it takes control of him. For example, he learns to defer gratification; this is a step in the dismal process of anhedonia. In learning to defer gratification he experiences a sense of self-mastery; he has become stoic, disciplined; he does not give way to impulse. He has control. Control over himself in terms of his impulses and control over the external situation. He is a controlled and controlling person. Pretty soon he has branched out and is controlling other people, as part of the situation. He becomes a manipulator. Of course, he is not consciously aware of this; all he intends to do is lessen his own sense of impotence. But in his task of lessening this sense, he insidiously overpowers the freedom of others. Yet, he derives no pleasure from this, no positive psychological gain; all his gains are essentially negative.

 

If Reik had been using my case history as his model for this theory it would not be necessary to alter a word of Dick’s description of it. This is me, to a tee. I have seen bits and pieces of these truths about myself in flashes of insight over the years -- particularly since my daughters have been college age and out of the house and I’ve been forced by default to spend more time contemplating myself – but here it is, laid out stark and bare in a novel. I recognized myself in it instantly, and without a speck of doubt, as I read it. Now it has become a fully conscious insight into my predicament, my pathology, my existential angst. Will that make any difference?

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Readings: Thinking About Thinking

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Below are more excerpts from Rudolf Steiner's seminal work, The Philosophy of Freedom. While contemplating his words about our perceptions of the outside world, it is important to keep in mind that we, ourselves, are objects of the world outside. We know ourselves directly and initially only as percepts, just as we know trees, tables, sunlight, and the starry sky first as percepts. Everything that Steiner says here also pertains to you as an existing being:

In thinking we have that element given us which welds our separate individuality into one whole with the cosmos. In so far as we sense and feel (and also perceive), we are single beings; in so far as we think, we are the all-one being that pervades everything. This is the deeper meaning of our two-sided nature: We see coming into being in us a force complete and absolute in itself, a force which is universal but which we learn to know, not as it issues from the center of the world, but rather at a point in the periphery. Were we to know it at its source, we should understand the whole riddle of the universe the moment we became conscious. But since we stand at a point in the periphery, and find that our own existence is bounded by definite limits, we must explore the region which lies outside our own being with the help of thinking which projects into us the universal world existence.

[…]



In contrast to the content of the percept which is given to us from without, the content of thinking appears inwardly. The form in which this first makes its appearance we will call intuition. Intuition is for thinking what observation is for the percept. Intuition and observation are the sources of our knowledge.

[…]

To explain a thing, to make it intelligible, means nothing else than to place it into the context from which it has been torn by the peculiar character of our organization… . A thing cut off from the world-whole does not exist. All isolating has only subjective validity for our organization. For us the universe divides itself up into above and below, before and after, cause and effect, thing and mental picture, matter and force, object and subject, etc. What appears to us in observation as separate parts becomes combined, bit by bit, through the coherent, unified world of our intuitions. By thinking we fit together again into one piece all that we have taken apart through perceiving.

By thinking, we also, then, fit ourselves together again as integral parts of the cosmos which is the context from which we have torn ourselves through the self-creation of that suffering personality which we know as "ego."
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Reflections: It's Nearly Over

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When I read these days, I use bookmarkers salvaged at my job from trimming legal size file folders down to letter size. This yields an item 2 inches wide and 10 inches long, upon which I can note page numbers and the paragraphs on those pages in which words that I may later want to share here can be found. I currently have several books sitting on the table next to my recliner, the markers in each of which are heavily scored with notations yet to be used. That’s how it’s been, of late.


Today is the last day upon which I can post here in the year 2011. My output has fallen off precipitously. This will be my 89th post, the least number of posts I’ve put up in a year since 2007, the first year I had the blog. But in that year I didn’t begin posting until July. I blame Facebook, and my involvement in several writers’ groups there, for my neglect of this site. That is a convenient thing to blame. Last year I put up 235 posts. If I start to read into this, it scares me.

On the desktop of this computer, I have a file entitled “Ruth Stone” within which are words I clipped here and there with the intention of writing a post expressing my enthusiasm for Ruth Stone’s poetry. This enthusiasm came only as a result of a Facebook friend’s writing of her recent death, and his posting of a clip of her reciting one of her poems. That file has been sitting on my desktop, unused, for several weeks now.

Among the books on the table next to the chair in which I sit to do my reading, is a copy of Ruth Stone’s, What Love Comes To - New & Selected Poems. In that volume is one of those bookmarkers mentioned above. On it are listed the page numbers of poems to be considered for use in the Ruth Stone blog post which never got written. Looking back over these now, I find that they are each quite wonderful. But I don’t remember why I picked them, particularly, except for one of them, which would have significance for one of my friends (and, therefore, for me as well.) So that is the one I will use here:

Where I Am

I’m not in a stone dungeon
under the streets of some Roman city.
I’m only in darkest Binghamton,
a second-floor apartment
in the company of two cats.
I have a plastic bag of dates
that claim to be grown naturally.
But how else can dates grow?
I see them hanging in huge clusters
from date palms,
as I once saw them from a bus
in the foothills of Southern California;
the streets of a small town,
adobes, lounging Indians,
a trading post. Then the fields of irrigation
and the forced water
spraying the great furrowed squares.
But I am here, not in a stone dungeon,
but in Dungeon Stone--
darkest Binghamton.

*sigh* -- It’s been that kind of year for me, too; year through which I would not want to live again. I’m glad that it’s almost over. I hope that next year will be better. I hope that yours will be, too. The contents of the Ruth Stone folder on my desktop are yet to be used. Perhaps they never will be. Perhaps they will die with this computer one day, not too long from now, when it finally gives up the cyber-ghost? Or, maybe, I will decide to kick off 2012 with a Ruth Stone post yet to written?
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Reflections: The Creative Urge

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I offer here, without further comment, quotes from two books that I've recently been reading and a poem of my own, finished just this morning.

I suggest that these three items be read with a thought to understanding why it is that they are related in my mind so that I have presented them in chorus:

from Rimbaud’s Illuminations: a Study in Angelism by Wallace Fowlie:


The theme of Rimbaud’s aloneness and uniqueness, his lack of position in society, his lack of a real bond with humanity is clearly stated in Une Saison and recurs in Les Illuminations, where he cuts himself off from one scene after another as if he were some angel at bay, moving with an angel’s power from setting to setting, without ever finding the precious kingdom where he might live and breathe. The angel is always losing hold of the beings he embraces. He cannot prolong ecstasy or fear. He is not of the world he creates. Every scene collapses into ashes because it was created by magic. The walls in Les Illuminations are always cracking open and the buildings crumbling away as if they were as overcome by dizziness as the protagonist. Each illumination is a world by itself, magically constructed, and giving way in an all-engulfing mysterious chaos to the next world which will stand up for a brief moment as if it were a painted picture. This is the child’s world of order that is really disorder, of a continually emerging chaos where only the poet’s mind can rescue what seems to be reality before it sinks back into the void out of which it first arose.

The soul of the poet is the protagonist of Les Illuminations. It is alternately enhanced by the appearances of the world and harassed by the contradictions of the world. [pp.46-47]

from The Bridge to Nothingness: Gnosis, Kabala, Existentialism, and the Transcendental Predicament of Man by Shlomo Giora Shoham:

We wish to revert to previous developmental phases and to overpower the objective demiurgos; but these goals are impossible and unattainable. Hence, we have to make do with the processes of creativity and revelation and not with their goals, which are either unachievable or meaningless. We, therefore, have the freedom to choose between an inauthentic narcotic that anesthetizes the basic fear and trembling of existence into a false bourgeois gemütlichkeit, or to harness the terror and anxiety of life for authentic creativity and revelation. Man’s exile in the realm of the demiurgos is thus vindicated. The exile of the divine particles enables the relational dialectics of creativity and revelation, which are impossible in the unity of the Godhead. Exile is therefore man’s mission for redemptive Tikkun of both transcendence and himself. It also makes possible the dialogue of grace between man and transcendence. Man needs a God, the “wholly other,” with whom to have a revealing dialogue, even if he is man’s own projection. [p. 170]

Vocation by Rob Dakin

The poet
broods in solitude,
doing penance for his failure
to transcend the light years
between the idea
and the spoken word.

Alone, he reads his work
aloud, then hangs
his scribbled shame
on the wall as a reminder:

His vocation is life without
hope of parole.

To declare victory
and accept the laurel
would be the Big Lie.

Yet his persistence in falling short
of a perfection that is instantly flawed
by his mere intuition of its essence
is his validating raison,
his authentic being --
his existence, ever separate,
but finally, so very close to God.

*****   *****   *****

Indeed, so near and yet so far.
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Reflections: Kant vs. Christ

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I have long recognized that a person looking for the first existentialist has to go back at least as far as Jesus Christ. Despite the fact that a Christian (albeit a disgruntled one), Søren Kierkegaard, is often cited in that role, many people wrongly assume that existentialism implies atheism. This is nonsense.

Any person who reads the Gospels with an open mind will readily discover that the focus of Christ’s teachings was always on the individual as the responsible moral agent. The idea that Christ came to establish a new mode of herd mentality is a travesty established subsequent to his ministry by hierarchical corporate entities primarily concerned with their own growth and survival, rather than with the souls of their members.

A true disciple of Christ would be an existential hero—an artist, a revolutionary, or a saint—not the obedient, compliant pawn of a self-serving authority structure. Establishment of a multiplicity of rigidly enforced statutes, leading to psychological disorientation and spiritual chaos, is among the most essential projects of the Enemy. The manifold is the lie; simplicity is Truth itself.

Consider the following excerpt from The Bridge to Nothingness by Shlomo Giora Shoham, and ask yourself if his description of existentialist morality is not in line with Christ’s imperative to love your neighbor as you love yourself.  When contrasted with Kant’s categorical imperative--the basis of most modern systems of normative morality--we can see, perhaps, the primary source of the cognitive dissonance that grips the collective psyche of political conservatives who mistakenly believe themselves to be “Christians,” while marching in lockstep to a demonic cadence:

Kant’s categorical imperative entails a judgment and a duty. It is natural, objective, and not experiential; it has nothing to do with social relationships and is hence absolute.

       […]

Kant’s morality has a life of its own, unrelated to nature, emotions, and suffering of those who are supposed to be subject to it. The categorical imperative has an I-it relationship with the people under its yoke. It is authoritarian and oppressive, a Wilhelmean Prussian schoolroom. Kant’s moral duty is uniform; individual peculiarities should be disregarded. In extremo, Kant’s categorical imperative considers all individuals to be Orwellian zombies, devoid of peculiarities, singularities, and specifics. Per contra, existentialist morality rejects impersonal pluralities. Masses are important only to the demiurgos. For the existentialist, the individual is everything. An existentialist moral act is not only always a posteriori, but relates to the experience of the other, as perceived by the other, within his specific personal context. Existentialist morality is based on—suffering with the other on his own turf and according to his terms. Suffering as an experiential dynamic is necessarily disregarded by Kantean, a priori morality. For the existentialist, the suffering of the other is the basis, criterion, and vehicle for the moral act. …A person who closes himself to the suffering of the other is existentially immoral, and one who is unable to empathize with the predicament of the other is an existential psychopath.  [pp.278-279]

It is clear that what Shoham characterizes as “the demiurge” – i.e. the amoral, chaotic natural forces wielding ultimate power on the plane of material existence – are in full control of any person who “goes along to get along” in this world. In order to have an authentic life, one must either fearlessly separate from the mass, in pursuit of one’s own creativity, or one must shed every last vestige of self in order to merge back into the One out of which one came into existence.

Groupthink is death by demonic orchestration.
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Quote du Jour: The Idol is a Colored Rag

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I have been so preoccupied since April with the precipitous decline, death, and funeral arrangements for my mother that I have paid little attention to Rodak Riffs. It must also be admitted that the instant gratification of Facebook has played a major role in the precipitous decline of this blog. Mea culpa.


That said, I came across a passage this morning in The Bridge to Nothingness that I thought worthy to share, and I offer it up as a Quote du Jour:

…Parents are programmed metaphysically and biologically, conditioned psychologically, and indoctrinated culturally to reproduce and rear offspring, so that their loss is tantamount to the destruction of their ontological raison d’etre. The loss of a parent for an adult child is many times painful, but it is ultimately accepted as the natural course of life. The loss of a young child, on the other hand, is inevitably experienced by the parents as a catastrophic blow, usually resulting in a permanent emotional handicap and, in many cases, in mental incapacitation. The death of a child causes for most parents a traumatic change of their weltanschauung, and in some cases a radical change in their order of priorities, meanings, and even the course of their lives. “There is no armistice for bereaved mothers,” and the patriotic glee of victories in wars is rarely shared by bereaved parents whose sons were killed in these wars. They feel cheated and experience rage at themselves for having either actively or tacitly participated in the sacrifice of their ontological sequel and embodiment to the mirage of patriotism--to abstract notions of glories, ideologies and creeds reinforced by the waving of colored rags, the shouting of slogans by bemedaled marionettes, and the self-important verbosity of hypocritical politicians. Worse still, their pain can never be communicated to anybody who has not experienced the same loss, and even communication with their partners in bereavement cannot dull the pain.

Dick frickin’ Cheney -- this man has your number. Parents--examine your priorities. It seems almost certain to me that a new universal draft is on the way; a draft to feed a global war, designed by our super-rich overlords to arrest the economic decline before it reaches the private beaches and tennis courts, the ballrooms and plush parlors of their loot embellished palaces.

Prepare yourself now to resist the evil, so that when it comes you will be ready with a plan.
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Readings: The Cosmic Concrete

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This poem by Charles Simic, from his collection My Noiseless Entourage expresses my attitude toward existence in the material universe, just about perfectly:

IN THE PLANETARIUM

Never-yet-equaled, wide-screen blockbuster
That grew more and more muddled
After a spectacular opening shot.
The pace, even for the most patient
Killingly slow despite the promise
Of a show-stopping, eye-popping ending:
The sudden shriveling of the whole
To its teensy starting point, erasing all –
including this bag of popcorn we are sharing.

Yes, an intriguing but finally irritating
Puzzle with no answer forthcoming tonight
From the large cast of stars and galaxies
In what may be called a prodigious
Expenditure of time, money and talent.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” I said
Just as her upraised eyes grew moist
And she confided to me, much too loudly,
“I have never seen anything so beautiful.”

Both takes on it are mine, from one time to another…
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Reflections: Lost at the Last Link

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Excerpted from a story by Yvor Winters:

“It was as if there were darkness evenly underlying the brightness of the air, underlying everything, as if I might slip suddenly into it at any instant, and as if I held myself where I was by an act of the will from moment to moment.”

I have been there -- in 1969 or 1970. It was as if a lens had clicked in place, or a skrim had suddenly been lifted, revealing in an eternal instant the authentic existence that underlay the world of illusion. The "real world" was seen to have possessed no more essential reality than a Disney cartoon of frolicking forest creatures. Existence was known as the ass-end of the Great Chain of Being: dead matter, imbued with that evil which is the utter absence of goodness. It was understood that once this horror had been realized there was no going back to the almost-happy dream, which was now known as a thin veneer covering an eternity of cold, dark, mineral death.

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I think that I'm back there now.

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Reflections: Lame

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Human society throws like a girl--no follow-through.
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Readings: Pair o' Phrases

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Je pense, donc je suis. ~ Descartes

Je me crois en enfer, donc j'y suis. ~ Rimbaud
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Readings: Those Mean Ol' Existential Blues

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Below are several short excerpts from three books that I am currently reading simultaneously. I was struck by how certain of the themes in these disparate volumes seem to strike sympathetic chords. I’ll kick it off with the following quote by Simone Weil from First and Last Notebooks:

Everything that is in the world is conditional.

That sounds harmless enough, even kind of obvious, until you start to consider some of its theoretical implications. Consider it, for instance, in the light of these excerpts from David L. Clark’s essay, “Otherwise than God: Schelling, Marion” *

Ineradicable melancholy is Schelling’s name for the underlying rapport that beings share with what conditions them, but which also forever eludes them.

And,

Life is no more and no less than the originary incorporation of its ground, the binding of itself to the absent alterity that sets existent beings on their perilous, mortal way. Ineradicable melancholy names the absolute conditionality of life, the subjectless, structural ‘recognition’ that life has from the start ‘lost control’ over its condition.

In the series of notebooks collected in one volume under the title, Some of the Dharma, Jack Kerouac makes the melancholy observation that:

It’s like we were all in jail and I’ve received instructions on how to escape. However I’m the only one now who realizes we’re all in jail, the others don’t know it yet they have an uneasy feeling that something is wrong but they put on gay fronts.

Kerouac—whose musing are heavily influenced by his contemplation of Buddhist scriptures—by equating human life to jail-time, implies that mere existence entails a kind of transgression, or guilt, resulting in the pain of an involuntary confinement.

Following Simone Weil, who sees this fundamental transgression as a theft, maybe we can understand Kerouac’s “jail” as a kind of “debtors’ prison”:

We have stolen a little of God’s being to make it ours.
God has made us a gift of it. But we have stolen it.
We must return it.

If only we could bring about Kerouac’s jail-break, we could, perhaps, begin to make this restitution.

But, while Simone Weil sees this feeling of conditioned freedom and existential debt as being owed to God, David L. Clark, explains F.W. Schelling’s interpretation that:

[H]umankind can never wholly possess itself or live entirely within itself, because it is always in arrears vis-à-vis its determining grounds.

Perhaps it is that which Jack Kerouac characterizes as “putting on a gay face” that Simone Weil sees as “lying to oneself” in extending the trope of existence as a borrowing transaction in the following:

The things of this world can serve as a kind of bank for the portion of our energy at our disposal – and it can be stored in them and even greatly increased by lucky speculations – but only at the price of lying to oneself.

Consciously or not, we intuit our indebtedness to the ground (or God) that gives us existence. Defensively, we create for ourselves the illusion of an autonomous self, either by self-delusion (Weil), or by self-distraction (Kerouac). Schelling, according to Clark, would have it that there is no exit through which to escape from these mean ol’ been-down-so-long-it-looks-like-up-to-me blues:

Life is the fundamental ontological structure of existent beings, whose pattern lies in God. If it were not for their agonistic and, in a sense, contingent struggle with the dark ground, these beings – divine and human alike – would instantly fade into the bloodless abstractions for which Schelling castigates European philosophy. Without the contrasting medium of the ground, without being conditioned by the ground’s otherness, nothing could ex-ist or stand-out, not even God. Animated and actualized beings are dependent beings: this is the lively equation that Schelling’s essay on freedom writes and rewrites.

Simone Weil speaks of this kind of thing elsewhere in terms of the need for obedience to necessity.

My personal observation is this: Only on Calvary do we see the tableau—sans any fancy philosophical birdsong—of the cost of true Freedom.
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*Clark’s essay appears in the anthology, Trajectories of Mysticism in Theory and Literature, edited by Philip Leonard


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Readings: Out of the Box

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To wrap up the Hans Jonas/Gnostic posts, there are these two final excerpts; the first is Jonas’ restatement of a Gnostic “formula” for salvation, as found in an apocryphal Christian Gnostic scripture from Nag Hammadi, entitled The Gospel of Truth:

The Gospel of Truth: the Formula

“Since ‘Oblivion’ came into being because they did not know the Father, therefore if they come to know the Father, ‘Oblivion’ becomes, at that very instant, non-existent.” Of this bald proposition it is then emphatically asserted that it represents the gist of the revelation of truth, the formulation as it were of its logic: “That, then, is the Gospel of Him whom they seek, which Jesus the Christ revealed to the Perfect, thanks to the mercies of the Father, as a hidden mystery.”

The second is a restatement of the formula from The Gospel of Truth as a philosophical “equation”:

The Pneumatic Equation

That the human-individual event of pneumatic knowledge is the inverse equivalent of the pre-cosmic universal event of divine ignorance, and in its redeeming effect of the same ontological order; and that thus the actualization of knowledge in the person is at the same time an act in the general ground of being. The “formula” is precisely a shorthand expression of that pneumatic equation—which thus is the Gospel of Truth. [emphasis added]

Kind of “existential,” isn’t it? As pessimistic as is the dualistic Gnostic understanding of the cosmos, at least it offers the human being who finds himself exiled in the material world a little help from Beyond—unlike, say, French Existentialism, which offers Man only his acceptance of the fate of Sisyphus as a remedy for the absurdity of existence—and his freedom as a condemnation, rather than as a blessing. At bottom, Gnosticism was an attempt to provide a detailed solution to the Problem of Evil, rather than just labeling it a “mystery” and passing the plate.
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Reflections: On the Imperfection of Existence

From the ridiculousness of my last two posts, back to the sublime of Plato. Here, through the agency of the character Timaeus, Plato contemplates the origins of the physical universe:

Timaeus: Let me tell you then why the creator made this world of generation. He was good, and the good can never have any jealousy of anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all things should be as like himself as they could be. This is in the truest sense the origin of creation and of the world, as we shall do well in believing on the testimony of wise men: God desired that all things should be good and nothing bad, so far as this was attainable.

Monotheists in the tradition of Abraham will note that Plato's creator—the Demiurge—is good, but is not omnipotent. Everything that he constructs, using the raw materials available to him, is good only so far as good things can be made of imperfect material. He is making beautiful, but essentially imperfect, copies, modeled on the Ideas of the Intellect or Mind Most High. So our world is neither created ex nihilo, nor is there any need of a Fall to explain the presence in our world of that which is less-than-good.

As for the situation in which we find ourselves relative to existence, Iris Murdoch notes in her essay “The Fire and the Sun” that:

Order is obviously more beautiful and good than disorder… Our participation in [this joy] must, however, be seen as modest. The contact with changeless truth brought about through insight into pure living mind can only for incarnate beings be limited and occasional, and we are likely to see more of necessary causes than of divine causes. The truth which we can grasp is something quiet, small in extent (Philebus, 52 C), and to be found only in the lived real moment of direct apprehension out of which the indirectness of mimetic art and writing and perhaps language and discursive thought itself always tends to remove us. Those who want to be saved should look at the stars and talk philosophy, not write or go to the theater.

Necessary causes that bind us to the material, to contingency—expressed by Simone Weil as that “gravity” of downward motion which impedes the upward-tending desire for grace—keeps us trapped, and moving horizontally, in a linear motion across time; time which is the created ape of eternity. Circular motion around an axis being infinitely more perfect than progress from point A to point B, the best we can hope for is to keep to the straight and narrow path on our journey—avoiding as best we can the many temptations gesturing from the shadows beneath the glittering lights of the broad way to perdition.

The conservative, then, as symbolized by circular motion, should be more perfect than the progressive. What is the cause of conservatism’s failure to partake of a larger portion of the grace offered by the beauty and the goodness of existence? Why does conservatism fail so badly in the service of love?

Reflections: Faith in Existenz

In the Edifying Discourse entitled “The Expectation of Faith”, the great Danish religious philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, assures us that “the expectation of faith…is victory.” The dark forest of myriad contingencies, through which the quest of the Knight of Faith must progress, harbors a “crafty” adversary, known as doubt:

In its secret way [doubt] sneaks about a man, and when faith expects victory, then it whispers that this expectation is a delusion. “An expectation whose time and place are not determined, is only an illusion; thus one can always continue to expect; such an expectation is an enchanted circle from which the soul cannot escape.” Certainly the soul, in the expectation of faith, is prevented from falling out of itself into the manifold; it remains in itself; but it would be the greatest evil which could befall a man if he escaped from this circle.

Kierkegaard goes on to assert:

It is true that he who expects something in particular, may be disappointed; but this does not happen to the believer. When the world begins its sharp testing, when the storms of life snap the vigorous expectations of youth, when existence, which seems so loving and so gentle, transforms itself into a merciless proprietor who demands everything back, then the believer looks with sadness and pain at himself and at life, but he still says: “There is an expectation which all the world can not take from me; it is the expectation of faith, and this is victory. I am not deceived; for what the world seemed to promise me, that promise I still did not believe that it would keep; my expectation was not in the world, but in God. …I have still conquered, conquered through my expectation, and my expectation is victory.”

This essential sadness and pain which dwells like a heart worm at the core of existence, which impels the Buddhist toward the refuge of oblivion and the consumer of the material toward the abyss of insatiable acquisitiveness, is for Kierkegaard the impetus toward the mysterious and paradoxical victory of the Cross. This is an existentialism without nihilistic despair: victory over existence.

Reflections: The Verb "To Be"

Most people have seen all of the below, but perhaps not all in one place, at one time, and considered in conjunction. So, mix 'em, match 'em, trade 'em with your friends:

I am that I am.

Tat tvam asi.*

The Tao of which one can speak is not the true Tao.

Before Abraham was, I am.

Existence precedes essence.

The world is all that is the case.
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*Thou art that.