The whole truth is not in front of me—this is inarguably certain. If I were to find meaning solely in what is seen, then I conclude that life is rarely more than passing time, momentary pain, momentary pleasure, hope, and unavoidable death. My experience would be that a fulfilled life is attained through physical, mental, and emotional safety—all of which would provide me a temporary insulation to the fact that one day it will all be gone. My whole existence would be necessary survival and luxurious escapes from slowly becoming non-existent. Beauty, love, and truth would be absolutely temporary. The purpose found here is that material possessions, nature, religion, relationship, and society all provide comfort, familiarity, and foundations for me to feel safe before annihilation. Inherently, any threat towards this familiarity reveals my greater fear, anxiety, pain, etc. Peace would be the absence of war. Love, the absence of hate. Life, the absence of death, and so on. The seemingly “good” would be completely dependent on its relation to the opposite.
In this sense, time is the ultimate menace and all of life is reduced to what can be gained, avoided, and experienced before it runs out. My morality and ethics would stem from this root fear, and depending on my understanding, they would consist of an obligatory agreement to behave in such a way so that the greatest amount of comfort could be achieved and prolonged—for my primary benefit and then secondly for the whole. Social imitation, scientific methodology, and chance would no doubt provide me the necessary tools to live in temporary synthetic peace.
This has been my programming. This is what is seen.
The real truth is in the unknown--the unseen. Like one gigantic sign-post, my entire lifespan is mercilessly pointing to the one place I have never been and cannot explore. Although I am permanently fixed in its direction and I am obviously hurdling through space at great speeds towards it, I avoid it at all costs. I subtly flinch and shutter on a daily basis with the underlying knot of fear that the unknown is certainly right in front of me. No matter how secure or seemingly in control I may feel, deep down, I understand that very soon I will be forced to venture into that place I cannot imagine.
This is absolute terror to my intellect.
Yet, here I sit, emphatically stating I will permanently do just that! I have realized--meaning made real--that there are two aspects of myself working independent of each other. There is my intellect (or the known, the seen) and my true heart (the unknown, the felt). To fully realize the heart--the unknown truth that surrounds what is seen--is now my primary intention and it is the main focus of this discussion.
------------------------------
All that I can know of my heart, is that it is un-known. It cannot be seen through the eye of the intellect. There is no idea that can contain it, so therefore it safely remains just outside the known. In this respect it is eternal--it cannot be reduced to passing time. No matter how strongly my intellect reaches for the heart, it cannot be gauged, grasped, or intellectually claimed as known.
The unknown is true peace because my heart is permanently separated from the drama of the known. So however tirelessly my intellect searches for peace, it will never find it by its own accord. For me to obtain even the smallest realization of the heart, my intellect must subside. I can be told in very practical language that love and forgiveness are the essential keys to true peace. I can repeatedly imitate these practices with great precision, and no matter how much they are fully realized in my heart, they remain but a past memory to my intellect. They are known only in unclear terms that are difficult to define because my intellect has only falsely claimed them after-the-fact.
My heart is wrongly labeled through intellectual language. Joy, light, peace, life, God, etc—are terms that might imply my heart, yet by themselves, these words only lessen it’s true meaning because of the dualistic nature of the intellect. I must remember that what is intellectually “known as good” is completely dependent on its relation with the opposite.
To my intellect, these words are inadvertently tied to pain, dark, war, death, devil, etc. Either side is no more than the absence of the other. So when I speak of my heart, the intellect either takes control, resists, or subsides. It can only hear the heart in a muffled whisper and from a great distance, because the truth is not found in words alone. Words are the intellect’s primary language, while silence is the primary language of the heart.
Silence is the unknown.
My intellect is not flawed—no matter how much it tries to convince itself otherwise. It is not at fault, imperfect, or even skewed. Like an advanced robot, it impeccably functions—in developmental stages—according to the conditions it is placed in. It is purely innocent in that it knows nothing beyond its function. It knows that it does not and cannot hold the complete truth, and yet, its sole purpose is to endlessly search for it. My reasoning is in a perpetual state of documenting, referencing, calculating, and duplicating what is known.
My heart is unknown.
Placed in the right conditions of affirmation and pleasure, my intellect will glorify it's self to the very end, falsely claiming it has found the truth. Conversely, if it is placed in the conditions of negation and pain, it will eventually turn itself into its own worst enemy in an attempt to escape what is known—even up to the cost of it’s own existence.
My intellect is not an enemy, nor is it righteous. My intellect is simply viewing the stage of the known. If the known is absent of pain, my intellect detects joy and vice versa. My intellect has no preference of what is known, it merely searches for what is unknown within the direction that it is facing. It’s purpose is to continuously explain the unexplained, which is inherently impossible, but keeps the intellect in continuous self-propulsion until death.
Like an excited dog chasing its tail, my intellect has spun my life through repeated actions and with such force that my dizziness was confused for truth. It has dominated my reality with the expense of my heart and at the cost of great time and pain. This is the imbalance I now seek to heal by fully realizing the true depth of my unknown heart.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment