NOEMAYA

Be large. Hold everything and everyone. Take care of your city. Respect public trust and social justice. One who cannot govern his own city cannot belong well to any earthly city. The sense that we “don’t belong” is often an attitude: parts of ourselves that we push away, abandon, or refuse to integrate.

A wise governor does not strive to keep only good citizens, but to nurture, develop, and transform even the troubled ones. A system that allows in only the good is not a city but a prison. The true governor stands beyond good and evil, seeing with superior wisdom that everything has its place, and that everything eventually finds its way.

I tell you this, my friend: you are a decent man. You have a good heart. You are innocent and extremely sensitive. Let yourself be. Let yourself feel. Stop hiding your decency to protect your sensitivity. Let yourself be moved.

Your meaning is yours alone. Do not let others’ shallow understanding determine the depth of your truth. Don’t cap it for fear of judgment. Depth is not yours to limit—you are a vessel.

Hold the hurt. Bear the necessary suffering. The alternative is neurosis and unnecessary suffering. One who cannot transform unavoidable suffering into higher meaning will shrink and walk himself into avoidable suffering instead.

There is no escape: either expand or live poorly. Man cannot choose happiness over suffering—but he can choose his suffering. He can choose the method of his own torture. And even then, all suffering holds a superior meaning within the universal wisdom.

A rug may feel the beating as unjust, but it is being cleansed of dust to reveal its beauty. A dog moans on the way to the vet, not knowing it is being dragged toward health, even against its will. We are no different: when we are dragged, we are dragged toward a higher plane. Yet we cling to the lower one because it feels familiar.

Even Christ was given the choice: carry the cross yourself, or be nailed to it and carried by others. The cross was heavy, the road long. That is the fundamental freedom—to choose one’s suffering.

The wise man is not a man of accumulated wisdom. He has become so transparent, so thin, that transcendent wisdom shines through him without obstruction. Wisdom is never his; it comes from beyond. He steps aside, and wisdom acts through him.

Beauty, too, is not possession. It does not reside in faces or forms. True beauty belongs to principle—the beauty of truth itself.

Most people stare blankly when you speak of wonder. You live in a foreign land, speaking a tongue that feels without meaning.

Son, I feel your longing. Perhaps you must become what you seek—complete yourself. You have sold yourself short, hidden your majesty behind distraction, and wondered why others applaud the clown while turning away from the depth that bursts from your soul.

You may think your insights and interpretations are accidental, but you also willed to live according to the original understanding. I tell you this with regard to the meanings that reveal themselves to you: how can it be yours if you have no substance? Even that meaning, that insight, as all meanings and insights, has its origin in Me. 

We provided shade for you because you kept your commitment and didn’t give up, didn’t relegate to someone else. In the same fashion, we provide for he who shows up and persists in the truth, the strength and faith and power to carry out our will.  

The journey of a philosopher must prepare him for the encounter with the fool and the Pleasure Island. You must first become the fool, and you did. But you got stuck and settled down. You remained the fool and kept attracting the fool. That’s the most treacherous and differentiating part of a man’s journey, the passage through the Fooland. Keep moving! Moving might kill you but staying cetainly will.

Isolation, too, has its purpose. Perhaps it is what it takes to cleanse you, to put things together again, to resurrect the original. You need deep connections, not superficial ones. You cannot thrive otherwise.