Have you ever seen a reality like this ?
I conjure up sky that is not-sky, sea that is
not-sea, shore that is not-shore, birds that
are not-birds.
What is the relationship between this, and
the real air, the real wind, the real wet waves
that you can splash in ?
" There is no logical impossibility in the
supposition that the whole of life is a dream,
in which we ourselves create all the objects
that come before us."
Bertrand Russell.
Did the wooden Madonna really shed a tear ?
Maybe she only weeps at night, alone,
when the church is empty, and there is
none to witness her sorrowing....
What is ' reality ' ? Is your's the same as mine ?
Does my ' reality ' resemble yours at all ?
What do we share in common, if anything ?
' Reality ' is, by definition, whatever can
be known.
The word is related to ' res ', meaning ' thing '.
The ' thing ', is what is known.
Res is based upon ' rere ', ' to think '.
So the ' thing ' is what you ' thing-k ' about.
' The Ten Thousand Things ', is poetic short-
hand for saying that there are a lot of them
out there. If you wish to be more literal and
scientific, and count them all, I think you will
find the phrase falls short by some orders of
magnitude. But it conveys the general idea.
" Listening to the Logos rather than to me,
it is wise to agree that all things are in reality
one thing and one thing only."
Heraclitus.
" All is one and one is all in all."
Meister Eckhart.
" Nothingness Thou art, fathomless Abyss,
to see Abyss in all that is, is seeing
That Which Is."
Angelus Silesius.
" Among the great things which are to be
found among us, the Being of Nothingness is
the greatest. This Nothingness is not unreal.
Compared with it, everything else is unreal."
Leonardo da Vinci.
The ancient Hindus found it, and wrote in
their Katha Upanishad :
' When the five senses are stilled,
and thinking has ceased,
and the intellect does not stir,
then, say the wise, one reaches the
highest state.
Not by speech, not by mind, not by sight,
can It be apprehended.
How can It be comprehended,
other than by saying ' It is ' ?'
Pseudo-Dionysius, Neo-Platonist of the sixth
century or earlier, found it :
' In the excercise of mystical contemplation,
leave behind the senses, and the
activities of the intellect...
that thou mayest arise, as far as thou mayest,
by unknowing, towards union with It,
which transcends all being and all knowledge.'
We use words to chop up reality into things.
Every language does it differently.
Some things do not exist in some languages.
Science has its own specialist methodology
for doing this, but even scientists cannot
agree, and divide themselves into ' splitters '
and ' lumpers '.
If each ' thing ' is a verbal brick, we demolish
the house by our reductive analytical thought,
and efforts to understand.
And then we forget to put it all back
together again.
You can live in a house, but not in a
heap of bricks....that's a significant difference.
This is one point where civilisation is going
wrong. Our knowledge bank has become so
vast, by splitting up the One into the Many,
that it is impossible to know everything. So
we divide up knowledge into specialities,
which take on a momentum of their own,
and spawn sub-specialities, which multiply in
their turn, and behave as if entirely detached
from all other knowledge. This fragmentation
is now so advanced, that it is very difficult
to re-assemble all the pieces of knowledge
back into the original whole. We forget that
there ever was a whole....but the jigsaw only
makes sense when the pieces are together,
when you can see the overall picture...the
individual components in isolation have lost
their meaning, their coherence, their significance.
The blizzard of new discovery and intellectual
information blows ever stronger. It is a full
time job just to remain well informed, let alone
find the time to do a full time job as well.
Information has become industrialised, and is
produced in exponentially increasing industrial
volumes.
That cunning old fox George Ivanovitch
Gurdjieff, who died in the year that I was
born, described an expedition he made in
1898, with some companions from the
Brotherhood of Seekers of Truth, into the
Gobi Desert in search of lost cities.
One of the difficulties they faced was the
impenetrable sandstorms which made any
movement impossible. They overcame this
seemingly insurmountable obstacle by
devising twenty-foot-high stilts, which
allowed the wearer to get above the layer
of blowing sand and to travel with relative
ease, because the upper surface of the sand
storm corresponded to the irregular contours
of the hidden dunes below.
As I have mentioned elsewhere, I have stuck
my head up above the sandstorm, and did
not much like what I saw. Global ecological
meltdown. I have tried to take an overview,
put all the pieces together, and get a clearer
idea as to where we are headed. Maybe I'm
wrong. Time will tell. But by then it will be
too late to do anything about it...
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