[Today...
Some fundamentals I'd like to share, mostly for myself, but hopefully also helpful for others:
Attention is, as Mary Oliver says, "the beginning of devotion." This is the most important lesson: our first order of business is attention.
Continuing from this first, most essential point: to "pay attention," is (following Simone Weil) to "wait." It's often a kind of boredom. We are lucky if we are bored; David Foster Wallace's The Pale King is one of the greatest works of art to me because it attempts and is successful at both seducing and "boring" the reader: the lesson of the book is that there is a transcendence on the "other side" of boredom (a lucid awareness of immanence itself; the bliss of living "a life" in and of itself (Deleuze, "Immanence: A Life"), which experience is usually mundane, unremarkable (often in a literal sense: incommunicable), in its daily details and repetitions), but what makes the book a masterpiece is its integration of this lesson into the reading experience itself.
At the bottom of it is the "ethology of speeds," as Deleuze and Guattari describe Spinoza's Ethics in A Thousand Plateaus. To pay attention is to slow down; which, as a paradoxical, nondual entailment, "speeds up" one's powers of affecting the world. Slowing down is a "joyful" movement, in the Spinozan sense of "joy;" it "speeds up" one's powers of "affectus" (i.e., the capability of affecting and being affected).
My favorite David Foster Wallace story (and also, my favorite short story of all time) is "Good Old Neon," which, for me, brings all of these essential lessons together in one concentrated whole. There's a formal logic statement in the story that states that one can either fear, or love, and that the domains of fear and love are exhaustive and mutually exclusive. To slow down is to love; to fear is to speed up. David Lynch's car symbolism also demonstrates this fundamental idea: Twin Peaks (in particular, Fire Walk with Me and The Return), Lost Highway, The Straight Story (the most succinct of all of these: life as a single straight line, followed by one individual who simply goes his own way), and Mulholland Drive (INLAND EMPIRE is also essential, but there's not much in the way of cars; the most essential symbolism in this one is "electricity," which is also, very importantly, one of the most important symbols in The Return---we should take Lynchian "electricity" nearly literally, in my opinion).
Karma---in the sense of psychological credits and debts to a Lacanian "Big Other" (all only ever in your own mind: "There is no Big Other")---is very Real. But time is always on your side---time is always free (and so are you).
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