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Midlife is only the time when this gets harder to ignore. If you’re wise, you’ll do this from your youth on and thus spare yourself from having your ontological premises crumble in a midlife crisis when everything you’ve lived for until now ceases to mean anything. twitter.com/QuoteJung/stat

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Jazmine Giovanni

@jazminegiovanni

May 6

Very much appreciate the premise here but speaking from experience, even when the shallows have been seen through and depth has come to reside, the firmament crumbles in midlife by design.

Jazmine Giovanni

@jazminegiovanni

May 6

Like an unavoidable right of passage, life rejects the meaning we’ve assigned it, a horror to those who think they know the meaning, which is only outdone to those who know there isn’t any. The existential magnifying glass sears us into obliteration. Good times.

雲水

@foodofthegods3

May 6

🙏 I was quite unsure of posting this as I have not yet reached that part in my life; just felt it intuitively to have some level of truth. As one can see even glimpses of the true nature of *it* when younger, and thus be perhaps better prepared when what you described happens.

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and

I disagree with the sentiment of leaving spiritual exploration on the latter part of life. My idea was that the more one postpones the realization of the utter meaninglessness of life, the greater the crash around those years when life forces it to happen.

3:58 AM · May 6, 2022Twitter for iPhone

Replying to

and

My implied intention was not so much to say one can prevent it from happening, but rather that one can perhaps adapt to it by learning the Way as young as one is able to—incorporating as an ingrained skill the ability to not hold against change,

雲水

@foodofthegods3

May 6

knowing one’s true nature throughout this particular Lila of Maya. And *if* one *really* gets *it*, like a true Bodhisattva of a strong perceptual footing, perhaps its ordinarily horrifying aspects can indeed be avoided. But of course this is reserved for very few.

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Replying to

and

Of course, with “spiritual exploration” I mean precisely an apophatic negation of meaning—or rather the untanglement of attachment to meaning—and not the search for some new, higher form of meaning. “Learning to swim rather than holding on to rocks,” as per Alan Watts.

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No need to doubt yourself, my dear. You are quite right that the crumbling of illusion is better sought than succumbed to… the earlier the better. Just find it odd that no matter what adherence remains in us, life finds a way to slip it from our grasp—the ultimate rug pull 😭😂

Jazmine Giovanni

@jazminegiovanni

May 6

And then there is the overwhelming panic of time running out, a persistent thought that although I “know” better, still remains— undoubtedly tied to the deep fear of losing my youth. Ah, isn’t this fun?

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