the Proverbs of Josh

Oh, wow. You don't realize how internet-dependant you've become until you move to a place in podunkville where you shovel horse and chicken poo for the rent. Anya and I have been there a week and at last the mouse-pee smell has been eliminated from the stove. We even got five dead mice out from under a cubbard, so we're making real progress on killing off the olfactory circus that's been playing peanuckle in our snouts.

That, in case you didn't catch on, was my apology for utterly abandoning this site for so long (has it been two weeks!?). I swear I'll make up for it when I get my free month of internet started up in a couple of days. For now, having had my "fill of pee" has gotten me thinking about philosophy and so last night I sat down and wrote out a whole bunch of "Proverbs a la Josh". They don't necessarily follow a logical path and half of them may be hooey, but here goes:

*A porous encounter with truth is the only path to humility.

*Humility is the path to truth.

*Humility is not the equivalent of self-abasement. In fact, humility more closely resembles self-love.

*Pride is always fantastical, and therefore ridiculous. If not for its destructiveness, pride would be funny.

*Almost everything good is funny.

*Not everything we call funny is good.

*Omnicience is a prerequisite for true and complete love.

*Incomplete love is still good and worth pursuing.

*No one ever truly pursues that which he or she truly desires.

* Intelligence and pride are not symbiotically linked, neither are humility and stupidity.

*Everyone is stupid.

*Everyone is intelligent.

*The greatest aspiration of any human intelligence is to teeter on the furthermost reaches of its capacity saying "thanks". This state is mostly unattainable by most everyone but children.

*Childhood is a state of the soul, and has very little to do with age, except in most cases.

*Most everyone hates themself to some degree.

*Self-hatred is a form of pride.

*Pride most often disguises itself as self-love, which it is not.

*Self-love without humility is pride.

*Pride is unsustainable for more than a lifetime.

*The greatest danger at any time to any human soul is that it might abandon humble Reality for the cheap thrill of a prideful fantasy.

*If I am repeating myself, in various different word combinations, it is because that is all there is to life. Everyone repeats themself, over and over and over. The only question is whether they will be repeating the truth, or a lie. They rarely know the difference.

*Desire is selfish because it imagines that the self ought to have something it does not. The self is already complete, it only needs to accept completeness (ah, but in what does that completeness lie?).

*Desire is often mistaken as a catalyst for action. It is not. The catalyst for action is deficit. People do in order to fill. Desire is an ineffective way to change the world.

*If people were to truly live, they would do nothing. That is, they would do nothing "out of" themselves. They would do many things, but they would do them as a conduit of something greater than themselves.

*I have an 8"X10" on my wall of a dead rat in a skate shoe.

*Knowing may be half the battle, but nobody ever won half a battle.

*Selfishness is the shortest path to self-denigration.

*Fear is the primary emotional state of the comfortable. That is because comfort is a self-imposed illusion, which is scary.

*Philosophy without change is gibberish.

*Change without love is always destructive.

*Dogs are better than cats because they are more edible.

*Frustration is almost always a result of desire. Eliminate desire and you eliminate frustration. It is impossible to eliminate desire. Only the desire for God and the Truth and Love therein contained can ever result in any fulfillment because only that sort of desire is self-less, by which I mean it desires something truly other than itself.

*Selfishness is hatred. Self-less-ness is love.

*Very few people ever desire God. Generally they desire an image of themself that they project onto God.

*Here, then is the conclusion. Desire God, not yourself. If you do this, you will avoid interminable frustration. Desire and love God by eliminating selfishness form your life, one lie at a time. To love God is to love and fulfill yourself.