One thing I’ve picked up from both philosophy and esoterism is cautious humility.

Every philosophical accomplishment feels like arriving at the ultimate goal. After reaching final enlightenment multiple times, and then seeing others arrive at the same enlightenment and do their touchdown dances, we start assuming that these victories are more commonplace than we can know. And we also start noticing the earliest and least impressive insights seem most unprecedented to those experiencing them and they inspire the most extravagant and extraverted eurekas.

It is easy to then go in an opposite direction. We want to transcend the ecstasy of epiphany and level them all down to mere novelties. We try to become objective about the most intensely subjective things. This can seem the epiphany of epiphanies. In fact, it is a mystical self-alienation. It is an objectivist misapotheosis. I’ve called this eclipsis.

I think the best thing we can do is stay squarely inside our finitude and our finite experiences and be as faithful to them as we can. We can try to transcend where we actually are and enter a new place where we will actually be. But knowing that we can always be elsewhere is not being elsewhere or everywhere. While we are where we are, we can remain aware that others have surpassed us and might very well witness our latest accomplishment and see its full modesty.

But why not, in all modestly, feel our full immodest excitement at our own modest accomplishment? Why not just take what happens as given, and do what we do, feel what we feel and say what seems true to us as well as we can? Let’s not stand outside ourselves and look at how we might seem from eternity? This seems the surest route to doing solid, valuable work. And it is the highest privilege of unimportance — a privilege we should not squander.