We Give Our Hearts to Know Wisdom
A few weeks ago I asked a very intelligent person if he thought it would be a better life to live in greater ignorance, to not "see" so much or try to know more. Did he think it would be better, more peaceful?
And he said, without equivocation, "No." He would stick with knowing, with seeing.
Regardless of the pain.
Seeing takes courage. It takes commitment to this tiny blue dot and our limited time on it; to being human. As difficult as it can sometimes be, we can't shy away from seeing.
As human beings, we are made, physically and mentally, to do this best through relationship with others. This is seen in the fact that we have thoughts - thoughts nihilistic, cabalistic and sublime; that we have language for attempting to share these thoughts; and even the fact that we have all this tender, available, exposed skin. Skin that makes us intrinsically receptive - to stimuli, to permeation, to one another.
We are made for cooperation and exchange and the sensing and interpreting of the outside world.
But we are also each, to borrow an analogy from physics, our own black hole. A black hole can only be known by its gravitational effect on objects near it. It, by its very nature, cannot be observed, because nothing can leave it. Even light and electromagnetic radiation are forever contained and consumed by it. It can only be seen in relation to other and effects.
Zia Haider Rahman writes "There were rare episodes when I sensed what might be pictured as a tiny hollow space within me, along some inward edge, a sensation that I have struggled hard to describe in my own mind....It is the feeling of missing something without the conscious awareness of what it is you're missing....Perhaps that's what friendship can do: the presence of another indirectly giving us better access to the unobservable parts of ourselves."
To live as healthy, happy, non-suffering humans, we need each other. We need both the pain and the pleasure that our minds and bodies and hearts use to feed and shape our humanity.
We have to keep seeing.
- And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increases knowledge increaseth sorrow. - Ecclesiastes
Do it anyway.
President, Ziva Retreats, LLC
6 年Very true, Miguel. Thank you.
Distinguished Teaching Professor at University of Cincinnati
6 年Beautifully expressed. Let me add, though that we often confuse feelings with happiness or unhappiness. But feelings come from outside stimuli, which, like feelings themselves, come and go, and can never be the source for real happiness. They are unreal and fleeting. Pain and pleasure coming from knowledge and exposure to the world are not who we really are or what defines us. What defines us, and the place where true, real happiness is, is that unmovable point inside us that won't be touched by feelings, that point where our petty unreal ego does not exist. That is where Reality exists, and the only place where we can find happiness.