Hide and Seek.

The waves of truth.

My belief system is erm… not cohesive.

Aside # 1: I would use the term cogent instead of cohesive here but the Grand Chu told me that it’s “too pompous” for everyday use. Point taken – though I do use it in every day conversation…along with heretofore, and hence and forthwith.)

Save for asana practice and meditation, ahimsa and seva (non-violence/volunteerism) as primary tenets in my life, I have no true constants. Nailing down what I think is like chasing down, cooking and then eating the white rabbit – nigh impossible friends.

I attribute this to being a fugitive and a seeker.

We’ve talked about this, seekers dig deep for answers and fugitives take the gold of lessons learned and sink back into the shadows to devour the meaning. More than any creature comfort I crave the ability to hold wisdom, to carry it on my back to a safe and secret place so that I may feast.

Aside # 2: This is why you will never see me without a book nearby. I never know when I will be afforded space to move from worker to seeker to fugitive. So I prepare.

Seekers look for truth. Personal, social, cultural psychological, cosmic…just truth via knowledge. This is why I might seem a bit flighty when it comes to what I believe. The unfortunate side effect of being a seeker is exactly this: no thing fully cups truth for me. I learn and my understanding of the world and who I am shift and I move with it.

Coffee house rules.

What is knowledge?

Why are we here? (My favorite!)

What is beauty?

What is morality?

On any given day I will give you different answers to all of these questions.

I may tell you that I believe we are creatures bound to a wheel of fate or that we craft the wheel of fate and bind ourselves to it. I will tell you that I fully believe in a deterministic universe and also free will (this is called compatibilism by the by). I’ll tell you that free will is a human construct defined via sense data of the individual and therefore doesn’t fucking matter holds all potentiality for existence or non-existence. I’ll tell you that none of it matters. None of it.

I’ll tell you that I trust Ayn Rand when she says that each person builds a world in their own image and within this world (and only this world) do they have the power to choose …the only rule is that choosing is necessary. I’ll tell you that I believe that we house all aspects of the cosmos within our cells. As above so below. That I believe that what happens at the macrocosmic level recapitulates at the microcosmic level. This life makes space only for operation within a predefined structure. That the only possible structure is that of beauty – that it is the most free an individual can be from the edicts of existence. That beauty is absolute spirit and that this ideal of beauty can only be expressed an interpreted internally as a subjective function.

Over coffee with blood shot eyes and too little sleep I’ll preface existentialism and tell you that I fully believe that Sartre is correct –we are our own project and condemned to be free. That the primary impetus of life is simply living and that while we are able to choose freely – this choice is a burden because it asks us to craft our own morality in a disinterested world. Or perhaps James Hillman has it right; ALL of it is up to us. There is no cosmic guarantee that we get to live a meaningful life but there IS a genetically crafted decree – foreknowledge burned into our bones that leads our life like a horse to water(Spinoza would say this as well…sort of). The Acorn Theory – the node of the self grows in the womb family history.

In my darkest of dark days I obsess over this one – the idea of never being able to shed the imprint of my family genetics…but on my darkest days I am always steeped in nihilism so …fuck it right?

If I’ve been reading a shite ton of metaphysics – I’ll prolly tell you that life is paradoxical and absurd. I’ll tell you that there is beauty in this absurdity because meaninglessness cannot exist without the concept of the other. Camus threw me this one, that it is best to tread that edge between the union of opposites because in this space we cannot possibly bow to the meaninglessness of life… because death is just as meaningless. Walking the tightrope of “ in-between-ness” and lending credence to both and neither is the only way to operate in a world known only through a veil of opposing forces. I dig this. Jung would dig this as well. Is it truth? No. None of this is truth.

If I knew the hard sciences. If my brain functioned in that way . I would connect my humanistic value system to the machinations of the universe. Thank Christ for Carl Sagan because he did and I’ve fallen asleep to him one night out of seven for much of my life.

Sleeping

I sleep and I dream and I wake and wonder how I could possibly believe in the meaningless of a life lived. I think that sense data has to be more than an infinitesimal synaptic response clicked off into a universal expanse. As the body of my partner presses up against me and I have the chance (the choice) to stay curled up or wake and watch the stars fade from the sky into morning I let go the seeker and the fugitive and …honestly I become vulnerable because to strip out of this costume Is to release many aspects of who I perceive myself to be. It’s effectively removing my representative.

So.

I become a Jungian in these moments. Lending credence to the larger symbols of the world, to semiotics and how they affect my personal interaction. I become a mythologist and bed down with Joseph Campbell and believe to the core of my core that the goal of life is to match my heartbeat to the beat of the universe. I believe that the world is ensouled – Anima Mundi. I believe despite the world possibly maybe being possibly determined – I get to be this passionate, sweet gypsy woman within it– I get to be a seeker and a fugitive and have the ability to express what that feels like and…it’s pretty awesome.

Pretty simplistic eh? Is it truth? No. Is it comfortable in my moments of respite? Yes.

I’m going to tap my favorite author ( okay ONE of my favorite authors) to finish this out – cause he can weave the seeker into my soul with a grace that I will never possess- plus, everyone should read this passage at least one time in this lifetime.

“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.

I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.” – The English Patient

We just…are.

Truth? Nah.

Sx3

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• Replacing the Lie with the Truth (myjourneythroughchronicfatigue.com)
• The Meaning of Life in 30 seconds or less (bradhp.com)

Tagged: aesthetics, epistemology, metaphysics, truth

Posted in: Belief Systems, Life, Philosophy