The Nervous System Is A Canvas

The nervous system is a canvas. It's an art medium - one in which you can turn the rituals and endeavors of your life into a masterpiece. You can train yourself to care about anything. You can train to find beauty and meaning everywhere in your life. But there's a catch: You have to practice caring about something for a long time before you actually *feel* like you care about it. You have to put aside your concepts and your boredom, and practice reverence, care, deep love. It has to be ritual, mindful and intentional. In this way, you can infuse your life with meaning, and reveal the shining, gorgeous, sacred unconditional love that lies at the ground of being. You can do this with anything: tweeting, making tea, changing a diaper, writing software, making love, fistfighting.

Thich Nhat Hanh, channeling Brother Lawrence, once told a Western student to wash the dishes as if each of them were the Baby Jesus. The point is that sacred and profane are empty when they are alone, as mere concepts. They need you to co-construct them. Decide, and they arise.

It's hard as hell to consistently treat the ordinary like it's sacred. Absent ritual and aesthetics and acoustics and ceremony, it means overcoming difficult emotions and resistances, and persevering when it's difficult. There's a reason it's a virtue! But it's worth it. The value is plain to see in any of the Zen-inspired arts. The tea ceremony, Japanese flower arrangement and gardening, aikido, bonsai, wabi-sabi: all of these practice locating the transcendent in the ordinary, over and over, until it just feels incontrovertibly *there*.

In one view, the nameless, infinite, timeless, gorgeous Divine *is* just there, at hand, everywhere, at every moment. We can't see It until we remove our blinders. It's waiting, beholding us patiently, setting an example for us. When we follow suit, It reveals Itself. If you're a committed rational type, you can just as easily say that the human mind can be trained into a trance that perceives the holy in everything. It's human practice, slowly conditioning the mind toward the human conception of the transcendent.

Truth is always paradoxical. The more of it you are strong enough to handle, the more the inherent sacredness of everything reveals itself. I don't personally give It a name. And I'm definitely not perfect - I forget a lot. The practice is the remembering.

Each and every moment is personally delivered to you, in a spirit of unfathomable love. It is there for you to reflect that love back - artfully, in context, as skillfully as you possibly can. This makes no sense. It is beyond the mind to grasp. It takes a leap of faith. It also takes a long period of grappling and gritting and difficult practice. You have to wrestle any habit, any thought, any conditioning, any trait or ability, any demon or angel that gets in between you and whatever God has put in front of you, here, now.

But pretty soon, you get with it. Pretty soon, you stop getting in your own way so much. You fuck yourself over less. You stop creating the conditions that pull you out of the here and now, out of the deep bond of love. It becomes easier to stay with it than to stray. There's just you and God. Then, there's no you and no God. There's a world, alive, pulsing with a holy gorgeous thrum, for all eternity.

You can start anytime. You can choose it, or remember it, right now. The nervous system is a canvas. You can make and unmake it into a thing of surpassing beauty. You can choose to give it back to the divine - to the Universe and Everyone in It. A little gift, to say "thanks."

(This article is a republication of a tweet thread originally written on December 6th, 2022.)