Everyone has blind spots, ignorance, naïveté, flaws.
There isn't a single person on the earth who is truly and fully immune
to such things, though some do seem more prone, and others resistant.
But the fact is that there is no perfect individual in existence. And
where I believe most people fail the greatest is in their blind spots.
Even the smartest, wisest, most perceptive individual has a blind spot
here and there. They may be small, but they're there, and when something
falls within that blind spot, it can have disastrous results. I must
admit that I have some pretty significantly large blind spots in a
number of areas. Unlike with a car, you can't just trade in your very
being for a new one. You can't just miraculously remove all of your
blind spots. Just like with a car, however, you can make adjustments,
and learn techniques, for avoiding many of the potential detrimental
effects your blind spots can have. Sadly, I also must admit that I fail
horribly in that area as well. What can I say? - I look but I don't see.
I search but I don't find. This largely applies to my relations to...
er... the rest of humanity. I'm somewhat of a sponge for academia, and
yet so terribly clueless with things in the natural world.
For
me, academics - particularly those which I control, and which are not
dictated by some sort of institution or other individuals - is like a
portal into another world. It's a world where logic lies in an endless
ocean of abstraction. Clean lines and solid colors can live harmoniously
alongside blurred and indefinable shapes and cornucopias of
intermingling colors. The accumulation of knowledge flows eternally
through and with the riptides of abstraction, forming thoughts, ideas,
rationales, concepts, and a myriad found only in the mind and soul, but
reflected in the world, if not reflecting the world. I can calm down and
focus in the meadow of numbers and mathematics, or become exhilarated
in the deep libraries of records. Records can be of all things,
meaningful and seemingly meaningless, often merely and so greatly a
reflection of the recorder. And while I can get lost in this wonderful
world of knowledge, quite benign to those around me, others exploit and
darken this world. Knowledge can be a dangerous thing in the wrong
hands. Even mathematics can be dangerous and powerful. Most academics
have relatively benign, if not beneficent, intents, but time and time
again their work and abilities are exploited, and my world of solitude
poisoned.
But no matter how much knowledge I accumulate, my life
never becomes more fulfilling. It's like having enormous wealth with
nothing to spend it on, or copious amounts of food that you're unable to
eat. It's there, craving a use and a purpose, yet such uses are lost on
me. No amount of literature could ever truly teach me how to live. I
cannot read my way into a cure for my social awkwardness and anxiety,
nor my variable moods, nor my difficulty with interpersonal
relationships, nor my inability to lead a truly productive life. No
amount of words and carefully researched and studied essays and articles
could ever teach me wisdom. Without wisdom, knowledge is useless, and
if knowledge cannot bring about wisdom, what does? Simple: experience.
Life experiences, spiritual cultivation, faith - of most all sorts,
and... failure. In three particular years of my life, I gained perhaps a
decade's worth of life experience, I practice spiritual cultivation
most every day, and I have faith in a number of things - even if it
wavers from time to time. But, of all of these, I think that the most
important is failure. I believe that nothing teaches wisdom greater than
experiencing failure. Even then, some just don't have what it takes to
gain... much of anything from their failures, while others may not have
had the chance.
While failure is a very vague, and poorly
defined, event for most people, it can often be defined by the very
individual who experiences it in some way. If nothing else, it is simply
defined as failure. Knowing that you have failed, with or without an
actual distinct definition, and accepting that failure is the greatest
step one can take to gain wisdom. So... why have I failed so
miserably at experiencing failure? I don't expose myself to it - or
rather, I avoid it at all costs. How do I do this? I do nothing. How can
you fail when you leave nothing to fail at? If you don't even try to
begin something, how can you lose at it? It's like standing on the
sidelines of a race, right? You can't possibly lose (or win) if you
don't even participate.... Or so my rationale goes. Funny thing is that
it's a rationale with little rationality.
I've been called wise,
an old soul, intelligent, bright, and so on and so forth. I've abhorred
such compliments for such a long time with little explanation as to why.
Well, I've come to believe in more recent years that my abhorrence was
the result of being aware of my many, large blind spots. Perhaps in the
back of my mind I reasoned with myself, "How can you be such things if
you don't seem to have anything to show for it?" I often tried to
convince myself that I only received such compliments because the other
people didn't truly understand the nonsense that I spewed, and assumed
it to be something smart. Looking back, that's quite an arrogant, lowly
view I had of others, even if it was mostly just a delusion rooted in my
own deep seated self-consciousness and low self-esteem. I not only
often neglected - neglect - myself, but I also constantly bully
and criticise myself. I dismiss or erroneously try to refute my own self
worth. I see myself in relation to the rest of the universe and see a
tiny, negligible speck that, in the grand scheme of things, is barely
recognisable as existent. But the most painful part is that I am just so
self-aware that, even when I am so hopelessly delusional, I always know
deep down that I'm delusional, erroneous, paranoid, overly
self-conscious, overly critical of myself, and so on. Knowing your flaws
can be both one of the most excruciating things you could ever
experience, as well as one of the most necessary things in all of your
existence. Unlike most people who are hopelessly swallowed up by their
flaws, I don't have a weak foundation with which my house is doomed to
fail upon, but rather... I have an astonishingly strong foundation with a
hopelessly poorly built house that's doomed to failure simply because
it is. I have the foundation... now I just need to figure out how to
build a better house.
Over 99% of the time, I lack anything near a
bad intention, and yet probably over half the time, my blind spots
cause structural weaknesses that can be outwardly perceived as bad
intention. I suppose you could say that I simply lack finesse... Sure, I
may have a way with words from time to time when it's written, but put
me in front of another human, and one out of every two times, I'm quite
certain I will slip up and cause some horribly unnecessary, and totally
avoidable, backlash. It can cause the perception that, no matter what I
do, it will likely end in failure... Even my avoidance of failure is
fundamentally a failure in and of itself. But perhaps the failure to
fail is an inadequate source to produce true wisdom. Or perhaps I am
more consciously aware than subconsciously. Honestly, the subconscious
mind - in my experiences - is much more influential for learning. Most
people say that their failures lie in the cognitive difficulty of
turning subconscious thought into conscious thought, but it's a bit
muddled there. If your subconscious teaches you a bad thing, and you are
not consciously aware of it, then you cannot hope to change that
negative thing. However, if you are conscious of something, but it's not
nestled deeply into your subconscious mind, then you cannot possibly
hope to learn it. The subconscious mind teaches, but the conscious mind
sheds light on what is to be taught, and acts as a doorway. And, now
that I think of it, I am currently undergoing the very processes
described above, as I try to reprogramme my mind to the very core, as
well as teach it new, good things (by embedding the knowledge and wisdom
into the subconscious mind via the conscious mind.) A harder feat than
it sounds, and I think it already sounds quite difficult.
Blind spots... We all have them.
[Disclaimer: This is a 3,028 word essay of philosophical rambling.]
I
read article upon article, individual word after individual word,
taking it all in like some mad supercomputer. I was almost
subconsciously absorbing it while merely consciously knowing that it was
absorbed. And as it become absorbed, images persistently produced in my
mind of some sort of liquid, slimy, grey creature made out of not
cells, or even a single cell, but the tar and muck and grime that it
squirmed in. It was almost horrifying, and yet so stunningly
captivating. It moaned without a sound, the melting expressions evident
yet constantly morphing and sliding away. It was the culmination of
centuries, millennia, of strife and bickering, of suffering and pain, of
ennui and anger. It was the culmination of the legacy humans would most
likely leave behind, masking all the greatness. It was disappointment.
Certainly,
it is easier to make judgments and speculations from atop the hill,
while looking down upon the battle from afar. Certainly. And I believe
it difficult to say whether it is more honorable to make such
speculations and judgments at such a vantage point, than to make
judgements and actions while in the thick of it. Hindsight may be 20/20,
as the saying goes, but why is it time and time again that mistakes are
merely pointed out, but seldom, if ever, learned from? Another adage
goes that history repeats itself, which, while not conflicting with
'hindsight is 20/20,' certainly suggests that there is some inevitable,
yet logically avoidable error in human judgment as a whole. And a few
may learn from the mistakes, and may in fact try to create change and
enlightenment, or simply avoid recreating the mistakes of the past
themselves, but humanity as a whole has some fundamental flaw.
That
moaning and groaning, slime-borne, mute creature of humanly Hell
personified (which is quite redundant, yet seemingly necessary), in my
mind, was spawned of the spats back and forth between people of such
similar minds fighting over one of many details. "It is a very
important, central, pivotal detail," one might say, but it doesn't
change the fact that the bickering and fighting and, many a time,
slaughtering was beyond unnecessary. How many souls faded from the early
by the hands of another over a detail? Out of thousands of various
ideals, beliefs, and concepts, one single idea could be different, and
wars might be waged over it. Mental illness does not lead to outrageous
reactions, to fighting and slaughter, to death and decay, to evil and
darkness... Some... core, fundamental quality, nature, or susceptibility
in humanity does. Some attribute it to demons or otherworldly evil
spirits, some to nothing more than humans, some to free will, some to
fallacies. A combination of all such things, or perhaps merely some, may
be the root cause. But then I think about those individuals who best
this susceptibility, this weakness, this flaw, and I wonder, 'If they
can do it, why doesn't everyone?' Free will. A double-edged sword.
Free
will is an extraordinarily frequent theme in many philosophies and
religions. What is free will? It is the idea that each human can act in
whatever way they so choose. This certainly does not mean that they can
achieve any goal that they wish, necessarily, or that things won't stop
them from either committing to that action, or succeeding in carrying
out the action. Surely, if a man with a knife from a hundred feet away
charges at a man with a gun, there is little doubt that the man with the
knife will probably be shot and possibly die before stabbing or slicing
the man with the gun. But the choice to pursue the action of attempting
to attack the man with the gun was completely the knife-wielding man's
own, made of his own free will. He may not succeed, it may be futile and
self-destructive, but it was his own choice. Many feel trapped or
chained, while forgetting that, inevitably, no external restriction can
truly take away their free will. They can try to get out of the chains,
out of their prison, whether or not they will succeed.
Time
and time again, man is witness to man's demonstration of free will
where free will may even seem unlikely. A convict tunnelling his way out
of prison, a militia thrusting themselves at their enemy in certain
doom, a pilot travelling some hundreds of miles across vast, isolated
mountains from his crashed plain in hopes of finding rescue. In
the face of hopelessness, man either breaks from delusions of having no
options, no cards left to play, or they embrace their free will and take
actions, however unlikely the goal behind that action is. And free will
is obviously, and not-so-judiciously or minimalistically, utilised in
lesser matters that may very well escalate to vastly consuming matters.
Everyone has opinions, beliefs, thoughts, ideas, perceptions, views, and
so on, but free will is the catalyst behind acting upon those things.
Often, they are thought to be our identity, or they are argued (perhaps
even with some ferocity), that it is not our identity when others
believe it is. And whether or not it is our identity is irrelevant to
me, at this time, if nothing else. The fact is that everyone with a
conscious mind has them, and often enough, individuals take actions in
regards to them.
And this is
not to say that one should or should not take actions fuelled by beliefs
and whatnot, some beliefs even dictating that one should take action
regarding the vary belief that is dictated. I am not about to argue for
or against any personal beliefs, and dogmas or philosophies, any major
concept in human history. I myself have never utterly agreed or meshed
with any one set of beliefs, abstractions, et al., nor have I utterly
disagreed with many, or most, that I have come across. An image comes to
mind of the modern sniper, proficient in becoming one with his
environs, clad in a ghillie suit, crawling slowly and steadily, while
occasionally attaching and assimilating foliage from his surroundings
into his ghillie suit. By taking the actual flora and making it a part
of his camouflage, his is able to seamlessly blend and become one with
the nature around him. Now, I'm not meaning to imply that I simply take
fragments of everyone's ideas and beliefs, assimilate them with my own,
and then blend in with what of humanity surrounds me. While I may be
more of an observer than an agent, while I may prefer to generally stay
back than jump up front, while I generally avoid attention than strive
and seek it, while I'm generally introverted and not extroverted... I do
not simply assimilate to blend in. Rather, most who have met me find it
quite hard to imagine me 'blending in.' While I may not pop out to the
masses, I am also starkly different from those who surround me
(sometimes creating the very strife, the avoidable mistakes that I've
been describing, wrought from incongruent views and thoughts, or
misconceptions.)
If I were to
try to describe myself in relation to my surroundings, to the world
around me, while trying to avoid self-centric, narcissistic,
self-praising, or any other such or similar adjectives, words, I would
say that I am like a lone nightshade in a field of lilies, dandelions,
roses, petunias, violets, and most any other flower imaginable, sans any
other nightshades. Out of a sea of flowers, some similar, many
different, some grotesque or appalling, others wondrous and enchanting, I
am the lone nightshade. So, while none or few of the other flowers
necessarily blend in, or are completely unique, while there is a
myriad of colors, shapes, and sizes, I still remain the lone nightshade.
Perhaps there is a lone lotus, as well, who may or may not stand out,
who may or may not look out of place, but that does not change that I am
a lone nightshade. And yet, do you know what is interesting? I
repeatedly point out what is different about me, as many people do about
themselves, or their beliefs, or whatever else goes on in their head.
People want to be different somehow, to stand out, or they want to point
out the contrast in an attempt to make others assimilate to them. But I
don't just want to point out my differences in this metaphor. You see,
everything I described was a flower. Everything I described was flora.
Everything I described took sunlight and converted it into sugars and
other usable resources through photosynthesis. Everything I described
has relatively similar genetic material and structures. And something
interesting is that I can list more similarities than differences about
my metaphor of being a lone type of flower in a field of other flowers,
and yet any two humans are more similar to one another than any of the
various flowers in the field. Sans organisms that utilise asexual
reproduction, humans are perhaps some of the most genetically similar
creatures.
Race amongst humans
doesn't exist, yet we wage war over it. For all of the seemingly
radical ideas that come from the many human minds out there, and
throughout the millennia, there really isn't a whole lot of true
uniqueness, novelty, or extreme in any one idea, relative to the ideas
of many others now and past. In away, ideas are simply one more brick,
one more plank of wood, building upon previous ideas, and creating a
singular structure. What that structure is or will be... I could never
tell you. I have not created a single original thought in my life, but I
certainly have taken many thoughts and ideas from others, I have
learned from experience, from history, from texts and others, I have
accumulated knowledge and wisdom, and the very specific combination of
those non-unique thoughts and ideas is what is unique. No one has
experienced exactly what I have, no one has learned the exact
combination of things I have, no one has thought the exact lifelong
string of thoughts that I have. It is not any one thing that makes
anything or anyone unique. No atom, no molecule, no organelle, no cell,
no organ, no gene is truly unique, and yet every individual ever born to
the world is unique through their individual wholeness.
With
so little, yet so much, uniqueness, it becomes harder and harder to
grasp what we fight about with one another. It becomes harder to even
comprehend war, strife, and struggles between other human beings. Sure,
if some sci-fi movie came true where some previously unknown alien race
chooses our very own planet to exterminate of all native species, it
would make perfect sense to war against them. There are also many
movies, stories, games, and even religions centred around 'battling
demons' or 'destroying evil.' It dehumanises these concepts, and makes
them something totally different. And yet, humans see these things,
compare one remotely similar quality to another human being, and decide,
"Well, you must be evil, so you must die!" What kind of rationale is
that? Or the idea of killing all who don't believe in your faith? Say
someone - 'Person A' - believes that someone else - 'Person B' - is
going to Hell because Person B believes something different, even if
only infinitesimally different, does that give Person A any - ANY -
right to kill or harm Person B? If Person B suddenly went on a murderous
rampage, then sure, if you can't detain and/or get them under control,
Person B probably needs to die. They did, after all, decide to go on a
murderous rampage. But if Person B wasn't causing significant harm to
the people and world around them, especially if Person B wasn't causing
any more harm than Person A, in what way could Person A ever have the
right to kill Person B because a thought in their head is different?
The
amalgam of all negative emotions, of all darkness and - perhaps - evil,
of all the wrongs in the world and all of the lives cut down
unjustly... in my mind creates this screaming, moaning, groaning,
crying, voiceless slime that constantly melts and slops and reforms and
morphs... It gets bigger and bigger and bigger until it seems impossible
to see anything else. How can one not see the accumulation of such
torment and gloom over the entire course of human existence?
And
yet, life would not be life without it. Why? I can't answer. I don't
have the answer. No one does. But, even then, I accept it, however
reluctantly. Time is an illusion, or so appears to be the more likely of
two unknowable things in my mind. Everything has happened, and yet, at
this moment, we have not experienced it all. We are finite, infinite,
singular and numerous, like a point that is a line, or a line that is a
point. A line, a ray, a segment... Time is all at once. Or so goes the
Einsteinian belief.
I have
faith, beliefs, opinions, ideas, thoughts, and yet accept many of the
philosophies of the so-called 'Sceptics,' those who followed
philosophical scepticism. But I do not simply reject what I don't know; I
just know that I don't know anything with utter certainty. Certainty
seems to be a very human concept, anyway. All words are human concepts.
And certainty does contradict faith, and so how can one have faith with
utmost certainty? Thusly, why would a philosophical sceptic reject faith
if faith requires uncertainty - the inability to know? If such a
sceptic were to every do anything in their lives, to simply not be dead,
would they not have to have faith that whatever they do will result in
something that they intended, whether or not it does? We invented words
like certainty, absolute, and definite, and yet we cannot say with
certainty that there is certainty? It is merely an estimated meaning of
an estimated thought. But language is constantly used to convey logic,
when language is at its very core not logical, but abstract. Creating a
logical language, as many have tried to do, is then a functional
contradiction. And then it's hard to understand the truest meaning of
contradiction, when contradictions often combine to create the world as
we know it.
I know much, and
yet I know essentially nothing, conceptually. Reality is a matter of
perspective, as is existence, as are beliefs and experiences, and so on.
Your brain reacts the same to a dream as to real-life stimuli. Randomly
firing neurons can create hallucinations that are no different from
reality aside from the fact that no one else can corroborate it happens,
and yet we humans often experience things that others can't corroborate
that, as far as we can possibly know, were in fact real sensations. But
why is one sensation real and another not? We have a name for what is
apparently unreal, a hallucination, and we can often explain its
existence. So these hallucinations that are apparently not real are
therefore a real phenomenon.
These
mind benders that we often get caught up on... They truly prove how
little we do and can know. And yet, if we can't know, how can we prove
it? Contradictions, paradoxes. And we get caught up on something like
skin pigmentation, bone structure...? If we were all blind, I doubt skin
color would've ever even been conceptualised. If we were blind and
couldn't feel, I doubt that bone structure would've been thought of.
Take away the senses, where we get our information, then we take away
reality. And if dreams are processed the same as 'reality,' then at any
time, we could be in a dream and think it was reality. Oh, so rarely
does an individual truly realise they're in a dream before they wake up.
And heard of dreams within a dream? There have even been ideas that
dreams are our souls essentially experiencing another life, making the
life we are 'awake' in, the equivalent to a dream in the other life, or
what we call a 'dream.' And some people lose touch with reality to the
point of just wishing to wake up from the dream, while they are already
awake. Some think that you can wake up through suicide, but for all we
know, that person just killed themselves and that's the end of that. But
the idea that if you die in a dream, then you die in real life, means
that trying to wake up by killing yourself doesn't wake you up, but
simply kills you no matter if you were actually dreaming or not.
The
fickleness of reality, of thoughts, ideas... of everything. Makes
bickering between humans, even wars, seem so... so... idiotic. And yet
the inevitability of idiocy, of the bickering, of the wars, makes the
bickering and the wars necessary. If one tries to destroy a people, in
order to avoid that destruction, one must destroy the destroyer. It was
done in World War II, the Allies versus the Axis. Hitler wished to
destroy peoples, to dominate, to dictate, and so it created the
necessity of warring against him. Conflict is always unnecessary before
the conflict, but almost always necessary after. As long as there are
initiators, there will be people trying to end what they initiated, for
better or worse.
I
just want to live my life... I just want to... make my strife and
struggles, my empathy and compassion, the best parts of me in the worst,
mean something. And everyone wants to mean something, somehow. Free
will... The double-edged sword. Or perhaps more like a rose... with so
many thorns. If you can manage to enjoy the rose without getting pricked
by its thorns, it'll have some benefit. But if you aren't careful, if
you don't handle the rose correctly, you most certainly will get
pricked, and if you continue to misuse it, continue to handle it
correctly, you just might get entangled in the bush like a bunch of
barbed wire. Such a beautiful, delicate thing... with such harmful
potential.
Free will...