Another Choice

The human body, such as it still is ruled and conditioned, has only at its disposal a few years of its life to realize an ascent, a harmony and a progressive development.

The sustained urge towards perfection and integrality of manifestation are only possible during those few years, from the teens to the forties approximately and, already at the start of adulthood, certain capacities of renewal and growth are declining. The joy of progress, of surpassing one’s limitations, of exploring new possibilities, refining faculties, of exactitude of expression, this incomparable joy soon must fall back on what has already been acquired more or less reliably and cultivate this much only despite the accumulated weaknesses, or else must try and develop other options while somehow compromising with degeneration. And yet there is in the body this common aspiration, this recognition, there is this innate trust, candid and clear – this “yes” for the progress of consciousness, for the presence of truth: it is there, in this Presence, that the body experiences happiness and security. Yes, indeed there is in the body – is it its mysterious intimacy with the inner being? – the sense of another physical, corporeal growth which ought to take place instead of this degradation imposing itself: a profoundly evident growth, this growth into which our self-experience aspires to embark precisely when this inherited body reaches a certain maturity. For it is then that, in our present experience of existence and of the world, of the others, of history and of our sense of the future, it is then that we would wish to move forward into the unknown, with all that we have grasped, understood and assimilated, so as to become at each step a new expression and manifestation of the self, purer, more conscious and more receptive. It is then that our body itself feels ready to seek for and develop new figures of expression and action and to apply in detail the perfection and the joy it now senses more clearly and concretely. But here we are: the physical law betrays us, the law of death, failure and defeat makes us bend our knees, fold in under the weight of the past, lean towards the “end” – accept our condition of ephemera.

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We seem then to be entering a conflict which has no issue: for even if we refuse this physical law that rules every body, if we refuse it with our forces of thought and life, even if we refuse it

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