Searching for truth(s)
As one attempts to come nearer to one’s existence as a human – its systems, structures and functions – from mental imaginative realms down to cellular genetic levels – the complexity and confluences involved can be bewildering.
Are bewildering.
It is easy to get one’s self “lost” as a human being. On literally billions of levels we participate in constant (and I mean unceasing) input and output of information, movement, form, energy and so on. It’s more than we can individually handle. Yet we are made to.
In other words, it is we as individual humans – our bodies, our minds and experiences – doing the bewildering we find bewildering. Perhaps this is my first noble truth: consciousness means being aware of and bewildered by our bewilderment.
How to proceed? There are a bewildering amount of possibilities and processes for us bewildered humans to bewilder our way into. We can study, forge purposeful relationships, work, play, think, dream, parent, fight or flee our bewilderment. Opened up, we do not know the options or capabilities, the extent our bewilderment can reach.
Everything is strange. If this were my second noble suggestion, it would imply that with each moment of our existence we are encountering the unknown. We recognize our existence by dissimilarity, non-identity, difference. This makes all things new. We literally have never been where we are in space, time or living at any instant, before. We do not re-live, we are ever living-into. The contents of the past can become part of our structuring and processing, but nothing repeats, everything “enters.” Each no-time now is brand new experience of unknown reality, experienced, imagined, interpreted, perceived and felt by us in incalculable ways through a vortex of communications and processes we have very little control over.
We, the producing products. Perhaps this is noble human notation number 3. What happens in our bewilderment of presentness is that our individuality opened out ubiquitously functions to produce experiences which are products of our experiencing. In other words we are unceasing experimentors producing experiences as our products. It all applies; it all exports. There are no deletions, erasures or extractions – only new experiences, new dissimilar moments of ongoing processing.
There is no exit from this process. Form 4: NO EXIT. Imagined observation, fabricated explanation, hypothetical objectivity, invented theories, meanings, interpretations of sense – none of these removes us from our experiencing or transfers us to any other point-of-view from our individual field. Bewildering in our bewildering surround. Semblances, “insights,” knowledge and so on are just pieces of the ongoing differentiation in bewilderment. How we exist, perhaps not the ant or paramecium or tree cell. But, then again, perhaps so!
If a lion spoke we wouldn’t understand them, Wittgenstein proffered. Another way of saying we’re us, bewildered and bewildering beasts, forging into the unknown. Our access limiting in its unlimitedness (i.e. finitude); systematically mind-blowing and ecstatically depressing in an awe-full or awe-some(?) way.
Be human. Be glad for it. Be wilder.
N Filbert 2012