Sensations
In a world swimming with sensations that render you exhausted and overloaded, meditation or tears become invaluable.
A thought for itself by itself to you.
*This post is untouched, unaltered, given to you as it was given to me.*
1.0
We are thrown into existence. One day we awake and find that we are breathing, as if by magic. From what empirically looks like a little cell to a manifold of goodness-knows-how-many. Where does it all come from? Empirically, it can come from nowhere else but what is already here, what surrounds me, preceded me and will surpass me. A thought always has this peculiar way of linking itself with other thoughts; thoughts that are always brought into the picture by questions, by how, why, what, when. Here we are, breathing, interacting, communicating, thinking, sleeping, waking, eating…. All doings, all happenings, and never really static, passers-by in an Empirical world that does not know how to stand the fuck still. I find myself lost in a pool of already-here-ness. A negligible dot in an endless empirical manifold. A nothing amongst everything.
1.1
I am here. Around me is what-is, what-was and what-will-be. I came from this tri-part synonymy. Can I be anything but a part of this tri-part synonymy? Where did I come from, empirically that is? Where could I come from but here and now, and what comes to the same, nowhere. Wayne Dyer once rhetorically remarked, you came from nowhere and you are ‘now’ ‘here’; “from nowhere to now here”, he proclaimed. How interesting a word play that is. How remarkably empirically valid it is. A cell can get its survival from nothing but what is around it. A human being is nothing but the constituents that make it, whose constituents are nothing but a part of the world it is already in. Think about the food you eat, where was it before you ate it? Think about the arm you use to eat that food, where did it get itself from, where does it gets the strength to lift the food that you eat from? Would you have an arm without that food?
1.2
Is there anything more than this? Am I just a part of nature making a pit-stop into what empirically looks like an eternity of pointlessness? It seems rather meaningless to exist as seemingly a part of something that you are just superfluous to. There is no empirical necessity to the human being? We are just accidents, needless and unnecessary. We come into and go out of existence and in between we do nothing but make what looks like a little change to the environment and then head once again into the everything that we came from. We are the childer of what-is, what-was and what-will-be. These are the boundaries of empirical thinking: we came from everything, and we go into everything, in-between this we are nothing to that everything that is us.
1.3
It seems we have nothing. We are and have nothing. A fleeting thing life is. A flicker of a candle in the wind that goes up in such a small smoke that it is almost negligible. Why live then? More importantly what does life have to offer? What is there that we can hold on to while we breathe till that full-stop at the end of the paragraph, or rather sentence, that is our life? It seems we have nothing, we are totally alone, and entirely a waste of carbon and water. What can be so important in life? Alas, there must be something!
1.4
We have each other. We have commune. Without you, I am nothing. Without you, I am not; a no-thing. You make me. With you I can be everything. With you by my side, I can go from a helpless little baby barely able to eat, to Hitler, to Jesus, to Mother Teresa, to Mohandas Gandhi, to Osama Bin Laden, to JF Kennedy, to Winston Churchill, to St Francis of Assisi, to William Shakespeare, to Immanuel Kant, to Socrates, to Galileo Galilei, to Thomas Edison, to Albert Einstein - I can go on and on. All these carbon expositions are who they are because of you and I, because of us.
1.5
This is why love is so important. This is why communication is so important. Why life would be nothing without the Other. Why life would be not worth a single penny without society to give it meaning, to give it grandeur, to give it value. The social is the salvation; it has replaced God. Alas, the social is and always was God. We find God, the everything to our life, in the social. There stood those who used him against us and for themselves. Those carbon expositions who abused an innocence to use another. They could not do this without you and I, without us. Where once stood God, humbly and accurately, in front of him blocking his view stood those who abused him. But that doesn’t make the social right – this is not an ethic, it is just a thought. The social as it is now, may be wrong and have many faults, after all is it a product of us, and one composed of parts that are likewise composed by us.
1.6
We are. This last phrase is perhaps the best thought I was ever given; I value it, I cherish it. Perhaps you should consider it too. Let’s consider it together.
Aphorism #1: Questioning
We Philosophers are insatiable creatures. We feed on enquiry; the one and perhaps only thing that nourishes us is ‘a question’, or questioning. We feed on asking, and asking, and asking some more. The more we ask, or ‘can’ ask, the more hungry we get for asking. To what end? Our hunger seems like a manifest proposition ad infinitum. Yet our asking is not without reason, we are seduced. Seduced by the very nature of a question, the power it holds by the delusion it offers, that sweet honey at the end of every question whose smell is enough to send us into frenzy: the answer. The potential answer has a hold on us that no analogy is fervent enough in its application, elegant enough in its meditative import or correct enough in its standing to adequately depict this powerful bond of ours. If viewed from the outside one cannot but admire this madness that has befallen us, this endless desire to ask and be driven to the asking by the promise of an answer. To the Philosopher an answer stands as a light at the end of a tunnel promising salvation, promising nourishment and promising a telos to all enquiry. No ‘true’ Philosopher asks without wishing to find an answer, for by his very nature a Philosopher wants to know, alas, he needs to ‘know’. The relationship between the question and answer is the Philosopher’s lungs, the question is the air he breathes in and the answer is the preservation, the equilibration of his state of mind, the satisfaction and fulfilment thereof.
All enquiries, of one form or other are driven solely by the need for an answer; it is the answer that seduces a Philosopher, not the question. The question is nothing but a vehicle, a momentary lapse, a medium to unity. Nonetheless, those of us who are Philosophers at heart, and not frogs of the swamp who wish to strip life from its greenness, are driven by a desire to understand, a yearning to be one with that which the question directs itself towards; the answer provides the possibility for this unity. No lover of knowledge asks because it pleasurable to do so, rather he asks because it is pleasurable to understand, it is pleasurable to be close to that which the question directs itself towards, to be one with that item of enquiry via the salvation provided by the answer. The answer is the primary drive of the Philosopher, and the answer is nothing but a manifestation of understanding, a manifestation of being close with that which the answer concerns, that which the answer favours. We favour the question for the answer it produces, but we give it no more value than that; our favouring, our value is directed always at the understanding, the oneness, the unity – the answer. Is there an end for us, or are we born specifically for this purpose alone, for this silent suffering of never being close enough to that which we require unity with? Is this our a priori; the tendency of an infinite regress of questioning without ever attaining the unity promised by an adequate answer?
