I have been in a strange mood the last week or two. I am working extraordinarily hard, but that is not unusual.
What I have been feeling is that I am a part of a circle, in search of the rest. My sensory talents can go so far, but then they stop. They dead-end. They are limited.
What I feel is that God can and should be a present reality, and not an abstraction. Theology kills God. It really does. It buries the reality in an enormous pile of trivia, that is then used for the concentration of temporal power.
God is a wind, an uneven wind–like all winds–that blows through, and is felt by few. I look into the darkness surrounding me, and feel something, but its nature escapes me.
The point of this post, though, was that growth begins with a sense of absence. You cannot pursue that which you do not feel you are missing. Had you no sexual instinct, the species would die out. Had you no hunger, you would need not learn to work.
On a more subtle level, if you cannot perceive your emotional or cognitive shortcomings, you will never fix them. You will never address them, unless and until some crisis forces you to.
No doubt most are familiar with the Taoist notion of the empty pot. Logically, for optimal growth, you should start with maximal absence. The more you want to learn, the more you feel you need to do, the more you will learn and do.
It has become clear to me recently, too, that learning/growth is a source of meaning in and of itself. It need not lead to something else. It is fine alone. You can decide to live so that you can learn as much as possible, where learning is not primarily academic, but emotional. You can learn to move better physically and emotionally. You can learn to think better. And yes, you can learn the Japanese Tea Ceremony, or the Samba, or how to brew great beer. These things all exist externally, but all learning grows your spirit to some extent, in my opinion.
When you are learning, you are moving. New facts and behavioral patterns are being introduced.
The other day I was looking at a tree, and contemplating the play of sun and shadow on it, and watching the clouds behind it, and it occurred to me that all that was happening, as we are told, in my brain.
Visual images, we are told, are input upside down, and “fixed” between our ears. Sounds generate harmonic responses in our ears, and are “collated” in our brains. If I touch something hot, receptors in my fingers send value-neutral impulses to my brain, which then assigns a value to them.
Why can’t intuition work the same way? The mind is a putter-together-er. It assembles fragmentary experiences into wholes that can then be examined cognitively, as frames of experience, now abstracted. If the nerves in my fingers have no mind, why must whatever brings in sensations through the ether, or whatever we call it? It is the assembler that matters.
As Bishop Berkeley argued, in effect, we have no means of determining that we are not minds in a vat, input sensations.
I am meandering, but hopefully there is something useful here for somebody. Long day, some beer involved.