Heavenletters

A big hug for you, doctor. I love you. This is a brilliant summary of so many things that are important to our lives.

If I say "but" now, this is not in any way to diminish your diagnoses and your essay.

Cause and effect play a major part in our lives, we are trained to believe in them, we take them for granted, and you, as a physician, have learned in the course of your studies that finding the causes for physical conditions is all-important. Like everyone else, from decades of habituation I implicitely believe in cause and effect, but at the same time I'm beginning to understand that they don't exist – as has been repeatedly stated in Heavenletters. Causality doesn't exist, the way space and time and matter don't exist, and this is not just some interesting piece of philosophy but beginning to become real in my experience.

To the same degree, I'm becoming aware of the fact that it is neither necessary nor productive to try to find the origin of my fear; and since no mental or emotional strategy has ever worked to alleviate fear, at least not the deep existential kind that seems to be called "angst" even in Englisch-speaking countries, it doesn't make sense any more to try to end it. Whatever the bugbear is in your life, once you find out (after several decades perhaps) it is really not inclined to leave you alone, you will simply turn away one day. Not towards better thoughts which never truly worked. No, away: nowhere.

In this turning away, I seem to be stepping out of causality and any other kind of coherence. And there are little split-second flashes of something that is indescribable but also clearly recognizable as that which I came here for and which is my/our destiny.

What you mentioned at the end of your piece, about turning burdens over to God, is extremely important and cannot be stated often enough. But even here, it is possible for some people (like Jochen) to be in a situation where it simply does not work. You can't. For some reason you just can't, for goodness' sake!!!

To sum up, there seem to be people like myself, like perhaps Emilia and maybe others among us, for whom nothing seems to work. Even Heavenletters can be frustrating for us when we find we simply can't do what they suggest. But God wouldn't be God if He didn't have a solution for everyone. And the solution that works when nothing else seems to work ist stillness, total silence.