Morning thoughts...
I’ve taken to a new practice in the mornings: Reading St Augustine via lexia divina.
I sit at my favorite chair and pick up where I left off. Reading carefully to ensure I’m consciously taking in every sentence.
At some point a phrase usually catches my attention and starts something stirring within my mind or my spirit. And I repeat these words out loud, over and over, playing with the emphasis, relishing and exploring different words with different repetitions.
And my mind starts spinning, not out of control, but building on the energy of the phrase and the idea behind it. I project my thoughts outward from the phrase and then speak extemporaneously, exploring and extending the idea.
Sometimes I tie it back to my own life and experience, trying to use this phrase to illuminate my past or light a path for my future. But most often I am searching for a higher truth, a grander pattern that suggests “the way things truly are”.
This exercise brings me a great sense of peace.
Why?
Many reasons, I’m sure. One reason is that I’m comforted by a synthesis of understanding. I weave this new phrase—this new idea—into the fabric of my current understanding of the world and so the fabric gains new colors and patterns and becomes richer.
Similarly this gives a sense of progress. That the way of the world is increasingly illuminated before me and so, in a sense, I feel my footing more secure as I walk the path, or at least I believe such will be the case after I close the book and start actually walking the path, since in that present moment I’m sitting on my duff.
But I also feel something spiritual, what I think many would describe as “closer to God” that I think represents a sense of connection with something greater than you, but not merely that it is greater but that it is also wise and benevolent and truthful. That I am connected to something true, good, and beautiful.
And those things (if we can slice them away from experience in such a way) which possess those three characteristics we claim “are the work of God” or “point toward God” or “are filled with God’s grace” and so on.
I don't practice formal religion, but I've been on about the idea of God for some time now. Not the metaphysics, but the functional role it plays in the human experience and how it promotes evolutionary fitness.
Not to equivocate, but I think Bitcoin is filling a similar role to a degree, for many people, myself included. I don't think "Bitcoin is God" or anything close to it. But it represents a pattern of action(?) that seems to be robust, reliable, and point toward the good.
What wisdom might we gain by studying it?
What is the spirit of Bitcoin?
