Dialogue ~ 24

In my previous blog I wrote, “purpose will find a person rather than the other way around’. Having said this, it is crucial to understand that one’s ability to experience purpose is not contingent upon one’s searching or doing but is more about one’s ability to be attentive.”

Now consider what the poet T S Eliot was endeavoring to convey through ‘Little Gidding’ (last of his Four Quartets): 

“… when you leave the rough road

and turn behind the pig-sty to the dull façade

and the tombstone. And what you thought you came for

is only a shell, a husk of meaning

from which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled

if at all. Either you had no purpose

or the purpose is beyond the end you figured

and is altered in fulfilment. There are other places

which also are the world’s end…. “

There are various commentaries about this poem which suggest that T S Eliot was emphasising a need for humanity to move into a unity of past, present and future in order to experience its salvation. 

T S Eliot referred to a ‘world’s end’ and at the end of his poem he used the words ‘between two waves of the sea’. Consider that he is referring to a pause (or moment of stillness) which occurs in the midst of one’s everyday consciousness, whereby there is a recognition or remembrance of one’s wholeness of being; that which exists beyond and in the midst of all of our shared experience and is powerful in its capacity to effect transformation. 

There may have been a similar message being conveyed through the words of Jesus when he said, “yet not as I will but as you will”. 

Moving beyond a concept of being an individual which is somehow separate from all others has nothing to do with removing one’s autonomy; it has nothing to do with devaluing diversity or removing any intrinsic freedoms which accompany an expression of being human. What it is calling for is something much more momentous: it requires a reappraisal of how we have been perceiving reality and of the nature of cause and effect. Just as flatlanders would struggle with an image of a sphere, we too might be moving from a consensus of individuation and of time to one in which multiplicity and emergence is recognised as being indicative of our true nature. 

If we are going to reappraise how we have been perceiving reality then one of the first questions to arise concerns the nature of knowledge. Plato’s Theaetetus proposes that ‘knowledge is nothing other than perception’. Socrates in turn equates this with Protagoras’ ‘man is the measure of all things’ and asks would that imply then that things are to a human just as they are to any human in particular? What of Heraclitus’ proposition that ‘all is flux’? Does anything exist in and of itself i.e. have stably enduring qualities or as Einstein said, ‘does that mean the Moon is not there when I am not looking at it?’

If there is doubt as to reliability of knowing through human perception, does that imply that knowing is only to perceive things as God or some supernatural being or a broader element of consciousness than an individual? Does being human equate with original sin i.e. is our perception of being human in itself an error or ‘missing the mark’ of knowing our true or primordial origin? What then is truth and how would it differ from knowing?

Returning for a moment to the concept that ‘knowledge is perception’, just ‘how far down the rabbit hole’ does perception go before we draw a line in the sand and reach consensus as to what constitutes reality? Clearly there is conflict, as why else would we have disputes as to what constitutes truth or morality or as to the meaning of phenomena in itself? How can reality be rendered or truth torn apart? Man is the measure of all things or ‘each to their own’ might work as a quick fix for contradictions, or even as a ‘holding pattern’, but what does it do for an enquiry into the nature of things in and of themselves? How does it correlate with science?

There is no way round but through, in that the nature of conflict itself appears to be an opening or an opportunity for knowing to present itself. Further, this opportunity will be missed if participants are stubborn and refuse to surrender hubris. It is not a game of ‘this or that or the greater of the two’ in that if A is wrong and B is wrong, then surely the solution is AB? No, to paraphrase Einstein, we cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them; conflict presents as difference but in reality is the same.

Historically, conflict has been presented as existing between science and religion. What I am currently seeing is that whilst conflict has existed historically, it has emerged from within the realm of knowing and of knowledge instead. The dilemma is that if we question what we fundamentally know as being true, then where does that leave us in terms of the great strides of progress that we believe we have made as a species?

To return to the crux of the matter: am I to begin with an assumption as was offered by Heraclitus, that ‘everything is in flux or is always flowing in some respect’? Certainly, that resonates with the conflict that I was experiencing as I began to write yesterday’s blog. How do I resolve or integrate a premise of fluidity with such observations as Socrates put forward (and summarised by Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) that (a.) qualities have no independent existence in time and space (b.) qualities do not exist except in perceptions of them (c.) changes in a thing’s qualities are not so much changes in that thing as in perceptions of that thing? 

I have to consider the possibility that an 'object' possesses an infallible or an unmoving attribute of ‘is-ness’ only as I am perceiving it; that in taking a ‘snapshot’ of an ‘is-ness’, I am effectively short-circuiting its becoming (but only within my field of perception). Why? So that I am able to discern, communicate with others about it and attribute meaning.

It would appear as if it is in the nature of individuality (of being one amongst many) and of choosing verbal language and co-operation, which is a predominant factor in my ‘glimpsing’ of an is-ness; one consequence of this is that I am going to be unable to know the full becoming of an is-ness and of how it would change my perception of reality. 

What is it that is generating form such that I am able to perceive it? Clearly there is momentum of some kind but what is its nature? Is it active or passive or is it multi-dimensional in that it is both/and is attentive? Such are the fundamental questions which are pertinent to knowing, instead of determining labels and attributes of form. 

Is it possible that humanity is trying to exist in the midst of the past, of what has already taken form and is by necessity (in that it emerges from knowing) in decline? Were we to recognise this, we might grasp at what we believe to be real and find that it evaporates or dissolves into dust in our hands.