The Growth in Clarity

It's the hole in the middle that makes the wheel turn. Lao Tzu

Simplify your life: Die! Nietzsche

Death for Nietzsche was the great oriental metaphor: death as change of consciousness, transfiguring of mind, transformation -

The path to death was star-shaped, with five radials...

abandon the old ways
release the self from convention
throw off the swaddling that has clouded your thinking
retreat from the barbarians that have bruised your senses
contemplation...

with all radials ultimately culminating in the centre... and in seeing.

Let death occur, death as a continuation of ontogenesis... let them die, the barbarians, the senses, and resurrect the essence out of which they were born.

Clarity is the motion of insight and of seeing. Philosophy is the wheel of learning. Growth is the hole in the middle that allows the wheel to turn.

'The whole life lies in the verb seeing,' wrote Teilhard de Chardin.

'Working in philosophy is really more a working on oneself', wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein.

As for Patrick Grant in A Dazzling Darkness,

The growth in clarity is accompanied by a developing appreciation of particulars... The experience of 'intense ordinariness' is less a flash than a steady attitude of attentive wonder in which even the most banal occurrences are experienced as eternally precious. The mystics insist that small things, far from being inconsequential, are of special significance. It is as if love's energy is released more powerfully by attention to the atomic; that is to the tiniest particles that unleash the most dynamic force... We may discover [an intense] joy in a sense of the infinite richness of particular things - in the detection of a timeless energy in the play of boys and girls in the street... in the beauty of a hazel nut or a leaf; or in knowing ourselves immersed with all things in a sea of created glory.

And let's not forget that this 'attention to the atomic' as Grant so eloquently puts it, and the 'atom' ( from Greek atomos "uncut, unhewn; indivisible,") is not actually a particle, but the whole universe itself.

[The Universe, Kelvin Arboretum]