Deadwood

What should move forward in time with me
And what should be let go
As if it’s deadwood
The more deadwood that you let go of and burn off
When you have the opportunity
The less it accretes around you
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Here’s something interesting about forest fires
People have been trying to prevent forest fires for a long time,
it’s because forest fires burn up the forest and that can’t b good but here’s
what happens if you don’t lt forest fires burn
Forests collect a lot of dry branches, right 'cause tree branches die and wood
falls on the forest floor and collects
The amount of flammable material keeps increasing with time
And that’s not so bad if it’s wet but if the amount of flammable material is
increasing and it gets really dry and then it burns, then you have a real
problem
The forest fire can burn so hot that it burns the top soil right off
In which case you don’t have a forest at all anymore, you just have a desert
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Lots of trees are evolved to withstand forest fires of a certain intensity
And some won’t even release their seeds unless there’s been a fire
And so a little bit of fire at the right time
Can stop everything from burning to the ground
And that’s also a really useful
Insight a metaphorical insight into the nature of sacrifice, right
It’s also a lot easier to let go of something when you’re deciding to let go of
it
Because you’ve decided yourself that you’re done with that
It’s a weak part of you, it needs to disappear
You do that yourself it’s much better and much easier than it is if it’s taken
away from you forcibly in which case you’re very much likely to fight it
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As you elevate your aim
You create a judge at the same time
The new ideal, which is an ideal you
That becomes a judge
Because it’s above you
The judge tells you what’s useless about yourself and then you can dispense
with it
And you wanna keep doing that and then every time you make a judge that’s more
elevated then there’s more useless you that has to be dispensed with
And then if you create an ultimate judge which is what the archetypal
imagination of humankind has done, say, with the figure of Christ
You have a judge that says
Get rid of everything about yourself — that isn’t perfect
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It’s a Phoenix-like process, right
You’re shedding all those elements of you that are no longer worthy of the
pursuits that you’re valuing
And then I would say the idea here is that as you do that, you shape yourself
ever more
Precisely into something that
Can withstand the tragedy of life
And that can act as a
As a beacon to the world, that’s the right way of thinking about it,
maybe first to your friends and then to your family
It’s like it’s a hell of a fine ambition
And there’s no reason that it can’t happen
You know every one of you knows people who are really bloody useful in a crisis
and people that you admire, right, you can think of all those people as partial
incarnations of the archetypal messiah
That’s exactly right
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And the more that, that manifest‘s itself in any given person then the more
generally useful and admirable that person is in a multitude of situations and
we don’t know the limit to that