A Reflection on Inquisitive Humility

"The waters are in motion all the time, but the moon retains its serenity. The mind moves in response to the ten thousand situations but remains ever the same. " - B. Lee

I think I’ve had a hard time stomaching my ignorance at times. Humility is telling me you’re excited about the prospects of knowing nothing, cockiness tells me I’m insecure about it. When I was a kid I tied my sense of self-worth on my apparent or actual intelligence. In ‘grande section’ when I couldn’t figure out why a fragmented triangle was made up of 15 total triangles rather than 14 smaller triangles I cried uncontrollably and refused any hints. Such a strong attachment to the outcomes of my inquiries gets in the way of how far and openly I’m willing to investigate without throwing a fit or running to some past achievement or quoting some obscure thinker, running behind the apparent image of my intelligence for some kind of comfort in my rigid and monolithic sense of identity. Sometimes I’d rather seem ‘smart’ than be curious, trying to find the answer to the mystery I’m faced with. Unwilling to identify what it is I don’t yet know that would get me closer to the answer.

Curiosity is so much less fun when its done to calm my inescapable and grounded insecurities that I know nothing, or at the very least, that no great work can be uncovered without doing the work in excavating the meaning behind my impression of it. Maybe even avoid doing the honest work of understanding a writer’s views as they intended them before polluting their account with my own abstractions and confusions, convincing myself readily that I know exactly what the author means without departing from every readers initial starting point: ignorance to this particular fragment, this relative viewpoint of the much larger picture. Even then we rarely ever understand it as its Creator intended it, neither the fragment nor the ever-larger picture.

Not to mention that whatever we’ve found is never ours to keep, it'll be like a straw claiming to have contained the wind that breezed through it. Can't claim it at least, without becoming enslaved by our obsession with capturing luminaries in our a snowglobes. Imprisoning what only ends up chaining us. The Moby Dicks whose obsessive hunts consume our soul.

Sometimes I might even avoid having a clear and definitive stance in fear of being detracted from it, and with it my feeble sense of identity as ‘intelligent’. My homie Swagdy once said something along the line of 'if you rigidly define your identity by one thing or another, you'll always insecure about it'. Once something comes along and challenges this trait which you ground your whole sense of identity on, your selfhood, personality and agency shatters with it. Like a spider's nest in the wind, if you immovably define yourself by your 'goodness' or 'intellect', 'beauty or 'capacity', your tap-dancing skillz or your even your likeableness in the eyes of your homie's parents, not only will you be constantly in distress about goodness, or smarts, or prettiness or capacitation. Once something challenges these identifications, we'll be shook. In our social relations we might even become defensive in one way or another. What do you mean I CAN'T TAPDANNCE WHOO TF ARE YOU??? My ability to have a good time absolutely hinges on you telling me I smashed my 'buck time step' into an 'over the top' riff walk on 7 beats? So if you can't even acknowledge that well then fuck you dhude.

I’ll avoid reading and surrendering to the text faithfully in fear of getting to the final word having understood not but one thing, that my monolithic identity as 'smart' has been A SHAM. All along, just a miserable wives tale, a mythic legend that failed to capture this crippling moment of defeat infront of the impenetrable fortress that is your homie's final report for class. Worse yet, I'll avoid it in fear that my unyielding beliefs might change! Or even that I won't be enough for Love now that I'm certifiably 'dumb', or a 'bad person', or ugly or whatever. To that I say: so what? So what if I don't get it, the first, second, or third time, so what if I go the rest of my life incapable of digesting this or that text. Firstly, improbable if I put in the honest labor of understanding it. Secondly, I’m not any less or more for knowing more or less than I know – knowing is a secondary function of living anyways, to be able to feel is much braver – for being capable of more or less than I am, for being aloof or ignorant, for thinking people from Sudan were called Sugandese.

So WHAT? You think everyone just walks around knowing how far the North Star is, or how to fix a Honda B-Series DOHC I4 VTEC engine, how to make rice or whatever a boson is, dude I can’t even spell Massachuchets and I don’t wanna know saraha. Undermined not only by the epistemic barriers our humanity places on all of us due to our sensibilities, our place in the Universe and the limited and luminous tools we have to explore it as observers gridlocked in Time. Undermined also by our bio-political and social environment as well, debilitating the humanity we vowed to care for by withholding or hampering material conditions necessary to facilitate seeing our World with an open heart. Apart from never really ACTUALLY being able to understand quite literally ANY THING in-itself beyond information about it in a linguistic and ideological codification I can comprehend given my biological and spiritual limitations as a human body & soul in this part of the globe living in this century; apart from all THAT! I’m still a doofus with questionable social skills, huge glares in basic adult survival skills about shit that doesn’t even matter (THE RICE JUST GETS SOGGY, and flavoreless??)  an insane amount of personal inadequacies or proclivities for other stuff, that keep me from getting “it”. It’s okay, really, I’m much more than my so called ‘intelligence’ the word really doesn’t mean any more than a finger like all other fingers pointing at the Moon. Especially when I’m also my willingness to ask about what I don’t know, and acknowledge what my limitations keep me from seeing! It's only when we accept that we know nothing that we become equipped for observing and inquiring about everything.

If you think material hubris is silly, comparing how many rocks you collected knowing full well we’re all going to die and leave these bodies and possessions behind, just picture how silly it is to compare how much immaterial foam you've managed to remember. Not even collect, knowledge isn't something we keep stored like water in a flooding library, instead, its experienced, most earnestly when it is observed like a scuba diver who swims amongst corals but leaves them untouched, or a pilot that flies between the clouds knowing full well if they tried to capture the floating fluff it would fall between their fingers, or even an astronaut that knows they'll never be able to bring a star home. How silly is it to compare how much water we filled in a bucket from an ocean we all swim in, or how many stars we've counted and communed with when we're all just as capable of looking up. Especially when the very condition of observing and wondering with an unclouded heart and mind is surrender to a natural existant so much bigger than what we are, one whose account necessarily stands outside the command of any single and isolated mind. An image that only reveals itself to those who wonder and observe outside and besides themselves, without the handicaps of ego, without the inquisitive attachments to pre-conceived notions or rigid outcomes that shape our process of inquiry. What's the point of projecting the image we have of the moon onto its surface through the tip of our pointed finger? The Moon is out there for all of us to observe, in its natural beauty; let the lights be, for themselves and in themselves. 

P.S: Sugandeesnutz

Wholeness and Single-Authorial Voice

“The oneness of life is a truth that can be fully realized only when a false notion of a separate self – whose destiny you consider apart from the whole – is forever annihilated.” - Bruce Lee

This separate self can be our estrangement from past versions of ourselves, dissociation from the present and living self, estrangement from our responsibility to our future self, or even watching our lives in the third person, like a character in a movie. Every version and part of our selves is engaged in our destiny; making room for every moment, color or impression of our self gives us a sense of wholeness. There’s an interesting notion I came across, that of a 'single-authorial voice'. When a writer gives voice to different characters in a novel, or even to the setting in which the story is written, while each of these participants in the novel is distinct from the other, they all share the signature of a single authorial voice. Similarly, ‘I’ observes the unity of concepts within themselves, the different rational, emotive, and spirited voices that compose who we are as well. There’s one voice authoring our internal lives despite the collection of multiple intermingling voices. ‘I’ allows consciousness to occupy a seat outside of its parts, observant to their unity. This means that when we’re ordering our internal lives based on clear guiding principles and values, there no longer is a need for a hierarchy between our appetitive, emotive, imaginative, and rational faculties, instead, each of our soul’s faculties is in conversation as a participant in this peculiar ‘I’ 's acts of introspective self-conciousness, the loving glue and mediator that holds our parts together.

You guys ever see that movie with Eddie Murphy where he litetarlly is an alien ship that's navigated by a smaller but biological Eddie who was the captain of the big Eddie star ship? Anyways he oversaw a city of action figure sized people living, breathing communing in bigger Eddie. Living their personal and collective lives when they're not too busy maintaning the big Eddie starship, loading the shipping bay, taking care of the dilithium chambers for the warpdrive, serving cocktails at the ship's lounge. All these inhabitants fulfilled their role in getting big Ed down to Earth, New York. Moving as a team in coordinating Eddie around the Bronx when he meets that kid with the baseball and gets tight with the kid's single mom. Does that ring a bell? I can't catch its name. Anyways my point is, if you had a city of inhabitants populating your soul, desires, memories, intuitions, duties of love and moral goodness, old and pulsating wounds, how would you run this city? If you were little Ed trying to coordinate your crew when navigating big Ed around the bigger Apple, communicating with others and getting ourselves out of some crazy mess or another, how would you run your starship? Is there order and cohesion in your city or conflict and dissaray. Does the engineering section have beef with command or the loading dock people? Is the city open to dialogue, understanding and inneraccord or does it struggle to converse among its inhabitants without lighting the torches and grabbing the pitchforks? Do you treat this city like a vault and little Ed as a bank thief planning a heist every time you want to get an action out into the world? Are all the inhabitants the same, homogenous carbon copies of the next crewmember on the ship? That seems like it could be uniformly harmonious, all inhabitants orbiting every wish of little Ed's. It would also be boring. Otherwise is each crew mate their own unique, individuated being living in a melting pot of a ship filled with all sorts of potential? What are the principles and values that you run this ship on? Who or what do you care about? That answer determines the directions you move towards and the choices you make or deny yourself altogether? Is each inhabitant equal in the eyes of your principles as the self-regulating rules of your inner autonomy? Are all these crewmates subject to your duties of care, your duty to the moral good, and to your own conceptual or rational standards? Is your city an unmediated tyranny? Is it loving? Free? Maybe even a mafia house that enforces blind loyalty to the ideal of the self? A democracy perhaps? Is it run with the collective interests of each of our soul's inhabitants or parts in heart? Is the population beside's itself and would rather wonder about the stars outside their windows than spend their time idolizing the big Ed ship they've been maintaining for years now and are over the hype? Do the little people in big Ed move towards the same ends, towards something bigger than big Ed altogether? A world to explore, navigate, love, help if they can, or maybe towards the Light at the end of big Ed's road, whispers of that light at the important cross roads and moments along the way. MEET DAVE!! IT'S CALLED MEET DAVE.

Some limits of Language

Thoughts aren’t linguistic by nature. Language is used to symbolize, capture and digest some sensuous or conceptual experience. We use language to translate ideas from their original form; and ideas are only a cognitive tool for filtering the affective and intelligible unity of our experiences. We utilize ideas to render our mediums of experience digestible by appealing to their distinguishable properties. Some ideas are memories our hearts, senses and awareness recorded or rewrote. Rational ideas are patterns of orderly design that scaffold our experiences. Once removed from the dynamic, sensuous and actual events we attempt to rationalize, and oncemore from the rational Principles that govern the our motion of the Stars when reason fails to investigate Nature’s active and living Intellect. Even then, sensuous ideas about the composition of the world are limited tools for aesthetic representations and subsequent judgements about the World. Our biological, geographic, historical, and socio-political conditions place serious limitations on our processes of inquiry. Take our experience of space-time, our sensuous ideas are represented to us sequentially, one after the other, we hear our friend speaking, feel the wind in the grass, observe a bird soaring in the sky. Our attention shifted from one sense to the next, seemingly in the chronological order in which they arose. While all these apparently independent events, the friend, the wind and bird, are being felt at the same time in the same contiguous and causally enmeshed space, we are limited by our eyes, ears and bodies, to consider each of these events distinctly in both our shared space and in the order in which our attention arrives to them. Our mental lives are limited in each person by the faculties they are equipped to experience the world with. A bat will experience the world through echolocation, feel the world in its sonar form. They’ll be closer than any humann to the mystery of what the ‘Sound of this Cosmos’ is! What sound or wavelength cuts through all the background noise, binding all the other vibrating strings that give form to matter with their own resonance, the Name that speaks harmony once at the centre of all distinct and dynamic voices that make up the Universe’s sonic and luminous canvas. Nevertheless, whether through sight or hearing, both the bat and the human would be beholden to the same unified electro-magnetic and living field, the same rock under the Sun, the same Sun under the Milky Way, the same Milky Way under the same Big Bang. The same. Even if we use different languages to digest and communicate our unique experiences of it. If the Truth can ever be truely heard, it is guided by the Good into the ears of an observer that sees with Love. It’s only with a Love that is detached from reward and outcome, that we can lay eyes on the currents of a Beautiful Cosmos that waits neither for our dispositions nor our arrival to make sense to Us.