On Sickness

I went through it a bit last week and as the result of passing a test of sorts, I am suddenly in total agreement with papa on something I honestly thought was a bit hyperbolic when he said it: he referred to the world as sick, a kind of clinic of the soul.

The process of spiritual elevation is the process of passing through sickness and out it, like a fever breaking again and again, each time bringing us closer to sanity, which looks insane to the ill.

It’s a surprisingly hopeful position, though the process of dealing with people’s illnesses can be taxing—the idea that living here, in this existence, is an opportunity over the course of lives to break the hold of sickness on our soul.

The really unpleasant part, at least right now (for me), is that I can’t help anyone, and not just because I’m sick myself. You can’t help anyone, in any real way, unless they’ve gone through enough lives to exhaust themselves with the classroom. Until they want more than the pattern of misery they’ve lived to exhaustion.

You can use magic to make people happy, of course, but that frequently doesn’t really help them. They slide right back into their miseries, unable to break that cycle.

The good news is that, maybe not this life or the next or even some time later, they will become exhausted with the cycle and it won’t be enough.

The focus is not this life, not now, not what makes now better—though you can’t get to the point where you even can focus on life until you’ve gone through a certain amount of elevation—but on the eternal, the moment when the last of us have gone through elevation and rejoined the divine.

I look around and begin to diagnose symptoms. It remains to be seen if I have enough clarity to recognize what I see, to be an instrument leading the sick to the divine.