Blind Spots

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.