Concepts.
Truth.
Strive.
Honesty.
Doubt.
Effort.
...
Keep going with the list above, you've got your own terms and you know you want to add a few. You can make each one a knot on an infinitely long (Gordian) knot ladder and climb it, or swing on it (my preference), and shit, maybe even one of those knots comes up sevens for you. "I don't know." In the last 5+ years I realize that I say this phrase like every fucking paragraph when I am having a conversation with someone. The irony is, even if I know or even if I don't know, I seem to prefix it or suffix it with "I don't know." But what do we know? What do you know? If we all knew, we'd either be a saint, luminary, billionaire, or something at least more than we are, and instead, we all buy books to find the guide to make us something more than we are. My thought for tonight was that all the fucking saints died in a sad, depressed, and miserable state, and here we are all are, chasing their supposed canonical BS and really -- likely all that they had to say was some sort contemporary meme that survived history in some ridicu-miraculous way (or was bankrolled or financed by someone who had a a vested, but non-humanitarian, interest). I don't know, you know?
You're on the thrill of the chase and I am cowered deep in the bushes, frozen, because freezing is a skill. You're making yourself the talk of town, the most illustrious of the illustrious conquerers, but when you miss shit, that -- in and of itself -- is a very unwritten story. Perhaps that story never gets written, I'm guessing it never does, but "shit never found" doesn't surrender its allure just as well.
From Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:
ReplyDelete"I want to talk about another kind of high country now in the world of thought, which in some ways, for me at least, seems to parallel or produce feelings similar to this, and call it the high country of the mind.
If all of human knowledge, everything that’s known, is believed to be an enormous hierarchic structure, then the high country of the mind is found at the uppermost reaches of this structure in the most general, the most abstract considerations of all.
Few people travel here. There’s no real profit to be made from wandering through it, yet like this high country of the material world all around us, it has its own austere beauty that to some people makes the hardships of traveling through it seem worthwhile.
In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty, and to the enormous magnitude of questions asked, and to the answers proposed to these questions. The sweep goes on and on and on so obviously much further than the mind can grasp one hesitates even to go near for fear of getting lost in them and never finding one’s way out.
What is the truth and how do you know it when you have it? -- How do we really know anything? Is there an "I," a "soul," which knows, or is this soul merely cells coordinating senses? -- Is reality basically changing, or is it fixed and permanent? -- When it’s said that something means something, what’s meant by that?"