Saturday, December 10, 2011
INTRODUCTION to THE BRILLIANCE OF NAKED MIND
There is a powerful strand in European thinking that ties knowledge to loss. There is an unbridgeable divide between the physical world, the world of the senses and knowledge. According to this view, understanding, knowledge, wisdom only come into being when the object of that understanding is disappearing or has disappeared.
In this outlook, words come into existence only to signify the absence of their referent. After all, when Itard set out to teach language to the mute wild boy of Aveyron, he taught him the word for milk by taking it away from him. Little wonder then that the child did not learn to speak. He did not wish to be deprived of more. The only other words he learned were “Oh God”!
Theology is a study that arose when God no longer walked with Abraham in the cool of the evening. Petrarch’s sonnets arose from the absence of Laura. Dante’s divine cosmos radiated from the absence of Beatrice. Folk songs and tales were collected and studied when folk singers and storytellers began to disappear. Anthropology came to exist when the people who were the objects of its study were becoming extinct. The various studies related to ecology now arise as the balance of the natural world appears irretrievably out of kilter.
Our knowledge, both in a scientific and poetic way, seems contingent on loss and absence, and our relationship to the experience of knowing is impoverished and constricted accordingly. We are only prepared for the kind of knowing that emerges when, as Hegel famously put it, “Athena’s owl only flies at dusk.”
In what follows, knowledge, understanding and wisdom pervade the total range of phenomena, arise in the simplicity of the present moment, and expand in continuous and uncontrolled profusion; here wisdom and utter wakefulness have never been separate and remain an endless terrain of ardent exploration. Only a lack of courage and a failure of love can make the world otherwise.
In this outlook, words come into existence only to signify the absence of their referent. After all, when Itard set out to teach language to the mute wild boy of Aveyron, he taught him the word for milk by taking it away from him. Little wonder then that the child did not learn to speak. He did not wish to be deprived of more. The only other words he learned were “Oh God”!
Theology is a study that arose when God no longer walked with Abraham in the cool of the evening. Petrarch’s sonnets arose from the absence of Laura. Dante’s divine cosmos radiated from the absence of Beatrice. Folk songs and tales were collected and studied when folk singers and storytellers began to disappear. Anthropology came to exist when the people who were the objects of its study were becoming extinct. The various studies related to ecology now arise as the balance of the natural world appears irretrievably out of kilter.
Our knowledge, both in a scientific and poetic way, seems contingent on loss and absence, and our relationship to the experience of knowing is impoverished and constricted accordingly. We are only prepared for the kind of knowing that emerges when, as Hegel famously put it, “Athena’s owl only flies at dusk.”
In what follows, knowledge, understanding and wisdom pervade the total range of phenomena, arise in the simplicity of the present moment, and expand in continuous and uncontrolled profusion; here wisdom and utter wakefulness have never been separate and remain an endless terrain of ardent exploration. Only a lack of courage and a failure of love can make the world otherwise.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
