Regarding the Good Life
I've got some Cobblestone brand burley flake pressed with some Kentucky in my Molina Tramonto Dark Brown Sandblast 101 Bent Billiard. As I sit in the sunroom and sip my pipe, listening to the gentle rain, deeply inhaling the wonderful petrichor I think to myself, “this is a good life.”
I used to be an adventurer. I remember being very young and saying in prayer one day, “Please God— come what may, I only want an interesting life.” I spent many years as a touring musician, an amateur fighter, a night-shift bartender in one of the busiest restaurants in New York City, a frequent sailor (ask me about the spinnaker incident in New York harbor), solo overseas traveler, stimulant enthusiast turned abuser, and general adrenaline junky. So much of our media messaging over the course of my life has glamorized this kind of life. I don’t shirk responsibility for the wake of my actions, however. But we simply must address the fact that we make choices based on certain moments of “realization” that effect the course of our lives. However, realization should be revelation— which is not a one-and-done thing. No, it is much more holistic than that. It is gradual and evolving and if we do not allow ourselves to remain malleable to this continual unfolding of understanding, this revelatory journey which is our lived experience while physically embodied wherever we are, then we may just end up continually making life choices based on a state of “realization” we came to at 16 or 17 years of age. We must check in repeatedly on our core beliefs and test them, critically and with no mercy.
In truth, my desire was for freedom— that was the motivating factor behind my life of adventure. Yet despite wherever I was in the world, making whatever decision I was making at the time, there was something inside of me that understood I was not free and could not be free. Because my actions were rooted in a reactionary ideology. I felt betrayed and ostracized as a young person and so I ran to and embraced a belief system and lifestyle which I believed was the antithesis of the beliefs of those I felt betrayed and ostracized by. I engaged in a prolonged period of “therapeutic blasphemy” in which my entire life was a rebellion against someone or something. This kind of anger begins as a flicker in a young person’s heart, then evolves— if kindled— into a flame, then to a roaring fire. At a certain point, after so many years, it becomes a low smolder. But it is always there.
What I eventually came to learn was that this is a fire that only burns the heart in which it resides and the one who tends to this fire, cherishing it even, is as a fool cursed by the gods. It is a phrase tantamount to a curse in traditional Chinese custom to say that you wish someone lives in interesting times or has an interesting life. What paltry stability I did allow entry into my life continued to fall apart and it was never any less devastating. I just added it to the fire. Until one day an unthinkable event took place. Someone I loved with all my heart died. Now this was a precipice which revealed itself as a crossroads. I could— in accordance with the original rebellion, of which as an archetype all rebellion is a microcosmic expression— turn to God and forsake Him forever. But I recognized that way lay only damnation; oblivion, no matter how self-righteous I felt that it would at least be self-selected. That is a child’s philosophy. On the otherhand, I could allow myself to be broken, like an egg. I chose the latter. Thanks be to God. It may very well have been the more painful route… in the short term. It was at this point I sought alchemical initiation— or rather, it sought me.
I didn’t know what magic or initiation or the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was, but somehow I found it. As luck would have it I was enabled in this trajectory to undergo a highly intentional and safe deconstruction of the self— an alchemical solve. It was only then that I began to move toward the Good. Not in a moral sense but in a Platonic sense, even though I wasn’t aware of it at the time. My views were changing but somehow I was not the one doing the changing. As my life grew simpler and I grew happier, I began to allow myself to feel and express love, deeply. Indeed, this revelation turned out not to be the acquisition or accumulation of anything— it was more like extraneous things being cleared away. Literally and figuratively, I came home. Odysseus was the famous king of Ithaca who, in the Homeric myth, went away to war and struggled for twenty years through a series of mishaps to get back home.
If you’ve spent any amount of time watching or reading my esoteric work, you will have doubtlessly heard me refer to a tale called “The Myth of Er” from book X of Plato’s Republic. It is a tale which recounts an ancient near-death experience. The protagonist of the tale— Er— is killed on the field of battle and placed upon a funeral pyre, where he awakens just before being burned. He then tells of leaving his body, arriving at a place beyond even the universe. In this place, souls qualifying for reincarnation intentionally choose their next lives, like drawing lots. The narrator of this story, Socrates, breaks from the main narrative to focus for a moment on the last soul to choose his lot:
“And it fell out that the soul of Odysseus drew the last lot of all and came to make its choice, and, from memory of its former toils having flung away ambition, went about for a long time in quest of the life of an ordinary citizen who minded his own business, and with difficulty found it lying in some corner disregarded by the others, and upon seeing it said that it would have done the same had it drawn the first lot, and chose it gladly.”
What is it then?— this sensation of satisfaction I feel sitting, puffing smoke while listening to the rain, and smelling the petrichor which moves me to say, “this is a good life.” It is peace… peace after the toil of the long and arduous war. But the war was never with anyone outside of myself. A peaceful life is a Good life and it does not come when one is free from the stresses of life, but when one stops approaching everything in life as if it were a battle. When the ruddy smoke of the smoldering anguish in the heart transforms itself into the pure, inviting hearth-fire.
I don’t write anything here to convince anyone of anything. I write here to offer up my own catharsis to whomever may need to read it.
Yours from the sunroom,
IB
-/-