I'm so tired, yet I need to speak. My body is tired. I've had a headache for hours; and I've argued much with my mother today. I also didnt eat enough - last ate at 4:30, and so no wonder I'm feeling off.
Yet I feel a deep, deep wound resurfacing in me. I'm afraid of this wound, this familiar, familiar foe.
I don't want to anthropomorphize - and I don't think I'm doing so. Perhaps a rhetorical flourish.
But it needs to be spoken so. This feeling, this pain in me, is me. It's me at another time, me at another place. There is no communing with this inner foe without acknowledging him.
I say a foe, because that is what he has felt like to me. And yet, I regard him as a foe merely as a disruption that can arise and so disturb my experience of self.
The language seems needed, deeply feels needed. I have suffered and do suffer with this feeling of weakness, worthlessness, patheticness; all these words do so little to cover the phenomenology - the unique, vocal-based form of my mental disturbance.
It is always awkward and painful for me to talk about these thoughts, because they're "so weird". Our culture prohibits exploration of subjectivity, which is a shame in itself, since sharing of second-order perception promotes a deep inter-subjective knowledge of the others phenomenology.
We all share one consciousness. This reality is so deeply, hiddenly, and ingeniously true, yet it sits in the middle, beyond logic, beyond any external effort to know. Robert Frost spoke "the secret sits in the middle and knows". The heart knows what the mind can only build language around. Our thinking, like the world that makes us up, is a vast architecture upon and around this basic, simple truth: love.
This truth is not beyond science. So long as this power has physical effects, it falls within sciences observational credo. This love yearns to be known more deeply: we can build the scaffolding of how it is we become with the flow of this energy.
It is a knowing that weaves itself through life forms yet strangled from full expression by the limitations imposed by time, space, and the matter that evolves within it.
But it weaves: it weaves its little knowing through physical reality, coming upon things that suit its immediate knowing.
Now in us, this knowing is a knowing of the nature of the knowing. We know ourselves primarily through our vulnerabilities; we recognize the "emptiness" of being when the world squelches us. Perched at the edge of chaos, complexity theorists say. With Damasio, we see that the human is a dynamical system of 100 trillion cells and 86 billion neurons, which registers the state of its metabolic "knowing", and the mind, outward focused, knows but knows within the dynamism of its body's "knowing'.
This emphasis and repetitious use of 'knowing' is not purposeless, but to point to the nature of this dynamic flow: love is coming to know itself through a physical vehicle. The process of being: drama, comedy? Such was the view of the Greeks. Awe-inspiring: horrifying? The Egyptians and the Hebrews seemed to feel the divine this way. A celebration of life and being - for India. A calm, soothing flow of Qi for the orient.
All these different views touch on the flow of being and the ways it presents itself. The various human cultures are each mesmerized by being in a different way; different contexts; different experiences; different meanings. The flow is different, yet it is the same flow, with different aspects.
Yet awe might be the only cognitive power worthy of being in the company of love. The awe from the knowing: from the beautiful, healing flow of the knowing.
The suffering mind is simultaneously cursed and blessed: the paradox of being crushes upon him. And yet, great knowings can burst from this heart of such people. Its as if the diameter of being widens with knowing deep existential sorrow. The pain of despair - the despairing face; the hole felt within. And the hope for release, or even, a chance to live.
And then what? How many stories does one need to hear to be stricken by the cynical. But my life, and my being, and the life of every being: theres a knowing - a sacred knowing. Can we be content with a sense of trust of that which appears to be beyond our knowledge at this point?
Love is so true. Love is being. Love is true knowing. All is embedded. And somehow, with knowledge of how one is embedded, choice appears, knowledge begins to blossom, and all out of one beautiful insight: knowing emerged, in the evolutionary past. What we call "apes", led to what we call "hominids". And the knowing went further, deeper, with a full blown mind, a memory of its knowings, crafted around the needs of the moments, with others.
One cannot but help but wonder, how profound is this secret of being?
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