After yesterday’s post, my wife said I was just saying the same thing over and over. In a polite way, she seemed to indicate I was engaging in a complicated version of the ‘poor me’ dance. After the ‘Greatest Gift’ post, Dan said I was thinking too much. One nice long drive later, I tend to agree with both of them.
In the ‘Greatest Gift’ I’ve elevated something as vacuous as public opinion to the status of ‘resembling truth.’ In retrospect, this is silly. People can’t adequately judge me any more than I can judge them. When I see a person doing something stupid, I have no context whatsoever in which to judge them. Perhaps the stupid thing makes perfect sense when viewed from the inside of the person doing it. Truth is, none of us as adequate information to form a really wise or useful judgment about anyone else. Without walking in the shoes of another, none of us can form an opinion on another’s bunions.
In ‘Empty Erudition’ I’m second-guessing the very fundamental principles on which I base my very existence. The pursuit of knowledge is not a mere means to an end. You do not learn just to achieve some specific goal. Learning is a life-long process and once you stop you might as well just drop dead on the spot. If I haven’t moved ‘forward’ in my workplace it has nothing to do with my choice of literature. Rather, it stems from my general attitude towards other people and the fact that I haven’t really TRIED to move at all.
So in that spirit, I’m moving forward and declaring an Armistice with Myself. This flood of attempted introspection has come to an end. Frankly, it’s pointless and no doubt very uninteresting to the external observer. Worse than that, it has no basis. Just as I can’t judge anyone else because I don’t live in their frame of reference, I can’t judge myself because I don’t really know anyone else as well as I know myself. Even the most benevolent person in the world no doubt looks at themselves in the mirror each morning with disdain.
In a bizarre sort of way, all the greatest epiphanies in my life have been due to Buddhists. Charlie (http://on-the-breath.livejournal.com/) fueled ‘The Emancipation’ and Dan (http://dabalogh.blogspot.com/) shares credit with my wife for ‘The Armistice.’ It’s almost like they know something we don’t. Hrmph.
2 comments:
I was going to respond to your entry entitled "Empty Erudition" but then you posted this follow-up making what I was going to say redundant.
But I like being redundant, so here goes. Instead of calling that post "Empty Erudition" you should have called it "Means and Ends" (the name of the post you wrote after that one). I say this because its entire foundation was based on a very insidious, and yet very endemic, Western assumption (here we go with West vs. East again) -- that all activity is a means to an end.
The Eastern rebuttal, which is reached after questioning what "ends" are in the first place, is that life is really the means. Our entire life is basically doing the "means" thinking that we're going to reach some "end" but the end is a fiction. There is no end. We think if we work hard, we'll "make it". But what in the world does that mean?
Does that mean that at some point in our future the fact that "we made it" is going to hit us like a ton of bricks? Of course not. And even if we do equate "making it" with amassing, for instance, a certain amount of wealth, when that time comes will we finally start relaxing? Of course not! We'll next set a "goal" or an "end" of double that amount and get back to working through means to achieve that new end.
And the cycle is endless and harmful because we waste our entire lives working towards some end that never occurs (because it can't, it doesn't exist) and miss living. John Lennon said "Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans".
In essence, the "end" is living itself, which also happens to be the means. So read what you want! Enjoy living -- it's here and now, not some fiction in the future.
Now can we please get back to talking about insect penises??
Yes, yes, exactly. I accept the reiterative correction. :) One wonders how much better the world would be if everyone had similar input (and believed it).
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