Personal Note XLII

Yahweh in (יהוה‎):
Moses and the Burning Bush

Stress!
Saturday – March 28, 2026

Stress indeed... Well, I tend to be stressed sometimes, and this is perhaps not so weird considering the state of the world, but it should be understood that this "state of the world" is no accident. The material saying goes something like this: "If you want cash you're gonna need to go out and get it". How poignant of a sign of our times and of the prevailing winds of the cosmological environment. But indeed, "cash is king" and in order for you to get it, you are going to need to be active. Since when did the contemplative modality serve you any good, in the material domain that is? Never, and such a modality would almost never be "awarded" or valued, valued in the crudest and most material sense", and if such a modality were to be "valued" it would only be to the extent that it could sustain the purse, and this is why there has been an explosion, particularly in the previous century, of all sorts of charlatans, read "Sacred Medicine". In the East, compared to the West, I should point out that there is a very faint contemplative modality still around, but this way of being is evermore weakened today.

    So, what other choice do you have? Really, how can you not stress in the modern world? Well first of all, the fact of the matter is this: stress can not be considered a choice, because the structures of the material order allows for no other modality than action, and the painful dissonance between contemplation and action is essentially the main source of all stress and worry in the modern world; there simply is no time for contemplation. Consider the word passive: why is this word associated almost exclusively with something bad in the West? Well, the reason for this is really that the Western mentality has become so sick and depraved that it knows of nothing other than action, and so anything that falls within the modality of contemplation is seen as defective and bad. Of course, for the most part passivity has a proper role to play, and from a metaphysical point of view, passivity is superior as a principle than action, because action requires contemplation; action without contemplation is just stupidity and blindness, something quite similar to the state of the world. Why is action so important then? Well, because action is immediate and corporeal. What is contemplation? Contemplation is the opposite of immediate and corporeal; contemplation requires skillful means and patience. Of course, within the manifested world, no such thing as complete contemplation or complete action would be possible, as they both tend to be situated at the very opposite poles of the manifested world, quality vs. quantity as many scholars would point out. But to answer the initial question: what other choice do you have? Well, you may have other choices, but it is still important to understand choice in the material sense as opposed to choice in the metaphysical sense. Truly, the concept of choice is profoundly entrenched in the modern confusion that is "preference", and at the end of the day, what we are dealing with here is, for the most part at any rate, a matter of individualism. To choose to not stress means to leave the world behind, and for more on that I direct you to my post: "Should you retire from the world?".

    Of course, when I was in the world I did stress, and even now I still sometimes stress, but while I cannot provide any specific guidance on how to deal with stress, I do believe that meditation is important, something that I have written about in the past and do not intend to rehash here. Beyond meditation I believe that some kind of disconnect is important, especially from the internet. As I tend to take the view that most people are either inclined towards contemplation or action, it would perhaps be more appropriate to suggest meditation for someone more in tune with the contemplative modality, and a better suggestion could be to still enter into some kind of contemplation for those with a lesser contemplative mode of being that still involves action of one sort or another, read "Working Out". This is similar to the modern concept of "introversion" and "extroversion", and while I do not intend to provide commentary on such things as psychoanalysis, I will say that there may be some truth to this dichotomy, but only a very small truth. On average, it would appear that most people who claim to be introvert are no such thing, and this confusion tends to come about because people that are really more action oriented tend to like themselves better in the mold of contemplation, but the fact is that there are far more extroverted people than truly introverted people, yet it would seem that most people are likely to "identify" themselves as introverted. Again, I cannot provide any insight as far as psychoanalysis goes, but I will just make a brief comment: in our times it appears that the concept of a "genius" has come to replace the previously held position of the elder and the wise, and because most people remain disconnected from themselves and even more so others, in our times of great individualism, people prefer to liken themselves to some kind of reclusive genius, especially since most people have been bombarded with unending material possibility and egalitarian notions of a kind of "class journey" their entire lives.

    But back to stress: would it then not, in the context of everything previously mentioned, not be so strange that people are stressed? Essentially, every moment of contemplation is quantified and put away, put away in the black hole of lost opportunity. Everything can be calculated and affected by the realization of possibility, which actually puts the living space of modern men in a perpetual past, a revolving cycle of anxiety and stress about all the multitudes of factors that could have changed the present. All of these parameters that have to be adjusted tend to place the future perpetually beyond the horizon; essentially there is no time for life, everything is now almost instantaneous. Yes, this causes great stress and great pain, yet it never creates serenity, true serenity, read "What is addiction?". As long as you live your material life you will be in the company of stress. This means that you have two alternatives: either you simply retire from the world, or you become friends with stress; the later option tends to be easier to implement but harder to live by.

Reginald Drax – March 28, 2026.