Errata

Karma is inescapable. I cannot escape the consequences of the hurt I have caused people. Sins do not lose themselves with the past. A residue remains, and inevitably comes back as suffering to be experienced in turn. Hence, perhaps, all the self-flagellation of the devout; in the hope that consciously inflicted suffering on the self will somehow erase the suffering the self is due. All of that, though, including this blog post written in insomniac guilt, will necessarily remain inadequate.

There can never be complete penance, complete redemption. Jesus suffers for our sins, and to contemplate his suffering is to retain some hope; love incarnate short-circuiting the karmic cycle as it were. And yet, it will always be impossible to replicate in penance the degree of suffering one has inflicted on others. The ego's repeated ruthlessness, the arrogance of forgetting yesterday thoughtlessly immersed in the present, all too real, all ineluctable, all etched irrevocably in the stone of the already lived past.

Forgiveness and forgetfulness are inevitably incomplete, the experience of the self is all too real, there is no ecstatic dissolution, there is only the endless, day after day, unreachable yearning, for the ideal, for the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.