détrop
You mean I only have one……problem?!
Whew……
Not according to our resident, on-line psychoanalyst, psyche I’m not.
But…thanks…I think… …Oops! There I go thinking again.
I do believe in ….something.
But you bring up an interesting subject and one I’ve been thinking about lately.
It has become clearer and clearer to me that awareness – and here I’m tooting my own horn – is an anathema to life.
Knowledge is anti-life in many ways.
We have been seduced by the Socratic promise that knowledge leads to virtue or that it is possible at all.
We have been duped by the notion of rationality and its promise to repair the imperfections of existence.
This has resulted in one-sided perspectives and on naïve interpretations of concepts such as love, justice, courage, liberty, nobility, morality, and virtue.
We have painted over the tragedy of life so as to promote an illusionary, ignorant joy and in the process we have made it a monstrous absurdity that can only fool the foolish and matter to the materialist.
Life depends on a degree of obscurity and on a level of mysticism.
The human mind was supposed to only enhance survivability and result in energy efficiency and material success. Instead, its own, unmitigated victory has resulted in it turning upon itself. The accidental by-product of self-awareness has uncovered the farce behind animalistic concerns.
There was a reason why the tree of knowledge was placed off-limits to Adam and Eve or why Nietzsche described knowledge as being detrimental to action or why Schopenhauer, along with many Buddhist teachings, preach a withdrawal, a disengagement from the world or why the veneer of Apollo becomes essential to hide the truth of Dionysus in Hellenism.
I mean I look around me and I see ignorant, naïve, simple minds totally immersed in life, completely taken with whatever they were given as meaningful or ‘right’ or ‘truth’.
I don’t mean to make this sound overly condescending – or perhaps I do - but it would appear that the simpler you are intellectually the more prone you are to become contented and to remain engaged and convinced and……happy.
The meek shall, truly, inherit the Earth, for the Earth was meant for them to inherit.
What place does a mind have in such a world of facades and illusions and where nothing of substance can be found?
This is a reality meant for instinct and blind action.
Courage here can be summed up as the consequence of spotty information and incomplete comprehension.
The risk taker is never aware of all the risks but only has an intuitive understanding of all the implications and possibilities. He acts out of sheer stupidity and hopes for the best.
I’m often amazed at what efforts and what sacrifices are made in pursuit of unknown and unattainable goals based on mere instinct and faith.
I look at the Iraq war, for example, and I see on both sides, bravery based on idiocy on utter obliviousness.
Then I look at western civilization and its Democratic/Capitalistic righteousness and I see a system dependant on its parts being completely convinced about the values it proposes and promotes and masses of unthinking, gullible, controllable minds that can dedicate a lifetime to the pursuit of material gain and social prestige in a universe with no property rights and an inevitable future.
They, of course, will assume that their love of life or their courage is the product of their character or some hidden mysterious power which gives them hope and serenity.
I see it as a product of ignorance.
If they could only perceive a fraction of what is involved in every decision, in every action, in every endeavour, they would freeze in their shoes.
If they could, for once, sense how futile and meaningless it is, they would be plunged into depths of despair from where they could never escape.
There are ample reasons to take advantage of the opportunity of consciousness and to explore reality.
But there is a difference between ignorance and forgetfulness or between unawareness and childlike indifference.
Much is said about living in the moment and enjoying life for what it is but if humans understood what this meant then all civilization would cease.
Civilization is built on the myth of posterity and many other ‘transcendental’ fallacies.
Really living in the moment means living as a child, with only the next moment as your event horizon, peacefully at play using his/her imagination and sharing it with others and transfixed by the singular, mesmerized by the instant and indifferent to everything and anything beyond that.