Every seven years or so I wake up in the middle of the night as if from a deep slumber not only of the mind but of the soul. When I wake I ask myself this question, who am I and what am I doing with my life? The answer varies, at times I have gone back to sleep satisfied that my life is on track and all is well whilst at other times I have felt deeply distressed and resolved to take my self/life in hand because all was not well.
Over the last few years a new thought has occurred to me this time usually in the day when I lie down to take a siesta. Who is it that asks the question, “Who am I and what am I doing with my life?� Following this line of thinking I ask myself what is this phenomenon I and others refer to as my life? I am having an experience that I refer to as my life, but what is this experience, where does it come from, when will it end and most importantly who am I that is having this experience? That is pretty much the experience I have in its pure form what follows are rationalizations based on this experience.
It occurs to me that life, or my experience of life that is, is a series of multifaceted, rich media sensory stimulations. I have been programmed to interpret these experiences as life/my life/living/being alive etc. But it occurs to me to ask is this word “life†sufficiently articulate/meaningful to explain the phenomena? I suppose in fairness I would have to concede that the word “life†is in fact, like all words, only representative of a psychic phenomenon which has an apperceptive concept linked to it. Which is to say that principally all I can comment on is in fact my personal apperception of the concept of life which is clearly lacking. Never the less this is where I find myself. So I ask who is the I that is being subjected to this experience?
[size=150]I feel as though in some form or another I had a life prior to this one possibly a life in which I new myself better. [/size]I look around me and see the people I know all riding the same rollercoaster that I am on but without stopping to ask, “How did I come to be on this particular ride in the amusement park, what prompted me to enter this amusement park, for what purpose (if any) do I find myself on this particular rollercoaster in this particular amusement park at this particular time, where was I prior to entering the park and significantly where will I go come closing time?â€
I fully accept that for 99.9% of people these questions are either ridiculous (because the answers are self evident), inconsequential (because they are unanswerable) or they have already found the answers (usually through religious doctrine or very occasionally through a personal religious experience). As fate would have it I find myself in the remaining .1% that asks questions of this nature and not only asks but fully expects answers.
The closest analogy that I can draw to this existential dilemma is the following. A man finds himself in Shanghai. For the purposes of the story lets say all his basic physical needs are met.
He awakes one morning to find himself residing in a hotel in central Shanghai, he is clothed, has money in his pocket and finds on his desk in his room his ittenery for the day. How he came to be there, the duration of his stay, his purpose and his life before today he does not know. What does such a man ask himself, what does such a man feel? Certainly he is in Shanghai and if one prescribes to the philosophy that the ‘is’, is sacred then certainly his present situation is paramount. But might not such an individual justifiably ponder the meaning or purpose of his situation, might such a man not struggle to place his experience in context?
I am struck by the fragility of reason. I say this not as an attack or reflection on the sciences of the modern world for which I like those around me am deeply indebted. But when it comes to discovering meaning, understanding purpose reason seems hopelessly inadequate.
Let me put it this way all these words, all these concepts are conceptually limited and colored. That is to say they convey a very particular, very limited aspect of “reality†that is all they do, they do not convey “absolute reality†allowing for such a concept for a moment. The problem is that a man who tells me a series of sequential events described by necessity using language or common parlance does so as though he were conveying the absolute. That is to say he tells me these things as though they some how explain how this event came to be. Whereas what I understand is that what he is telling me is a series of events, which he witnessed and is only able to relay these events within the very narrow limitations of the language. He is using and his rational interpretation of those events. But the “real†how, the “real†why of those events, assuming such a thing as real exists as an objective concept, he does not nor cannot say. For the very simple reason that he does not perceive any reality beyond what he has related.
We are faced with two apperceptive tools which shape and color reality, sense organs and the mind or consciousness which interprets the sensory information. So then what I am perceiving and calling reality is clearly neither objective nor absolute rather it is a subjective and narrow ‘slice of realityâ€.
An analogy that comes to mind is the following, I am seated in a cinema wearing glasses which affect what I see of the movie playing on the screen so that a very particular image of the movie is created for me. The question is, is there a way that I can remove the glasses and see what is really showing on the screen?
Regrettably my rational mind says no based on the following reasoning my brain is sensory processing unit which has been fundamentally designed to process information in a very particular archetypal fashion. To compare it to my earlier analogy it is as though my brain which is my primary sense organ is the glasses which I am wearing in the cinema, so if I remove them what would I use to process the incoming information? So it is an inherent design feature in a human being that he has a very particular sensory processing design and it is inherently impossible to move beyond this. Having said that a few things come to mind that would allow for a movement beyond this limitation the biological evolution of the brain, it seems reasonable that we are processing information differently to the way cavemen were, for one. Another assumption is that possibly I am not synonymous with my brain in which case there may have been a time in the past, or there may be a time in the future, when I perceive reality from a different perspective using different apperceptive tools; although frankly that is hard to imagine rationally.
I’d suggest to you some more paragraphing, and some Walter Kaufmann.
Thanks, more or less, on both counts. I am not familiar with Kaufmann. Can you suggest any particuler work of his you think is relevant to my post?
headache? boredom?