I believe you will like this expression of Wisdom:

Gaining consciousness

From a 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, novelist David Foster Wal­lace, who committed suicide last September at age 46 after succumbing to a two-decade battle with depression: “In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actu­ally no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some invio­lable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap real mean­ing in life—then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.

 “On one level, we all know this stuff already—it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power, and you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, and you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

“The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They’re the kind of

worship you just slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value, without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.

“That kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear

much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the ‘rat race’—the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”

Wallace concluded his speech with a little story. “There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys, how’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim

on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’ [What I’m talking about] is simple awareness—aware­ness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: ‘This is water. This is water.’

“It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.” Sadly, we no longer have Wallace among us, but we can still learn from him.

—The Wall Street Journal (wsj.com), 9/19/08

Summary point: “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”

Julio