In you go into the great sea of mystery!
Wednesday 13 November 2013
Mystery!
Mystery, mystery,mystery, it is all a great big mystery and this is not Hercule Poirot kind of mystery, it is the mystery of being; being something or just being. We seem to have a life with a shape but from time to time you see that it is just a shape, a small happening on a great sea of mystery. But the great sea of mystery certainly isn't chaotic, it seems to be full of intelligence, fully blissful and complete without endings or beginnings, difficult to explain but sometimes clear to the unwavering inner eye. Meditating on this mystery, the inner eye can connect with and recognise itself in that mysterious totality. And then it turns outwards again and gets back on with whatever it has ahead.
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Searching for the I…
ReplyDeleteA quick thought on “I” and “self”…
The briefest of musings on this thorny subject made me grasp at a copy of John Donne’s immortal words as a kind of comfort blanket (see below)…
It is very easy to theorise about the chilly existential uncertainties of the world beyond one’s own mind, the essential but lonely privacy of personal experience, and the dark, unfriendly world of the solipsistic unknowability of anyone but oneself…but what a bleak and profoundly unlikely reality such philosophical accounts present!!!
Donne’s beautiful poem presents a far more acceptable and likely account of “self”. Even if he is wrong and his words are a plea or a wish rather than an assertion of the truth of the matter, I for one will cling onto his words for dear life!
'No Man is an Island'
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
John Donne (1572-1631).
David
Dear David,
ReplyDeleteI love that poem, and I don't believe that loneliness is part of oneness, loneliness is horrid and shouldn't be tolerated.
See you in a fortnight,
Bestest,
Liz
One or Many?
ReplyDeleteI absolutely agree that “oneness” does not entail loneliness or aloneness. Particularly if oneness refers to being “at one” with or “as one” with the rest of the society or the human race or indeed with the entire universe, it suggests the opposite i.e. everyone is essentially part of an enormous fellowship or community that denies aloneness.
However, much traditional philosophical thinking, particularly in the realm of the theory of mind and knowledge, focuses on “privacy” or the “privileged” status of experience and perception and the only truly certain knowledge being personal thoughts. Now while I get the rationale behind this thinking, it is this desolate solitude that supposedly resides at our essence that I find difficult.
If we are essentially social animals-which I think we are-then surely our essence would be better understood as consisting of concepts such as companionship, community, mutuality and hence complexity. The Hobbesian analysis of human life (mentioned last week) as being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” seems not only bleak and desolate but plain wrong.
“Solitude” and “loneliness” are defined by their opposites; they are the absence of companionship, company and human love…they are not things in themselves…check out Duke Ellington’s “Solitude” for a musical expression of this!
David