Shades Off.
Posted: Wed Sep 02, 2009 1:19 am
Shades Off.
There is a particular way of approaching the world, of negotiating it and all
that is in it, which can guide one through the mistaken perceptions which prejudices and overheld beliefs blind one to. Being thus unblinded, all those who cast off their self-imposed blinds perceive of a similar world, paradoxically as close to the real, objective world as, I think, we can know.
Jung might have called this shared view ‘the collective unconscious’; Buddhists perhaps might call it the Dharma Boy of the Buddha. The veil itself has been named the Veil of Maya, and the Bible describes a glass through which we see but darkly. Perhaps it is, too, this veil, Nietzsche’s Apollonian un-tethered from the Dionysian—the Apollonian surface sheen which obfuscates and isolates the unruly earthiness of the Dionysian. But all cultures, it seems, have had a glimpse into the reality that dwells beneath surface image, and that reality is not, as Jacques Lacan, that pessimistic Freudian obfuscator would have it, a nihilistic void, but instead it is the exhilarating sea air of pure potentiality; the potentiality of the infant; of the creative imagination; of the acorn which contains the unfolding potential of an oak tree.
In this glimpse beyond, which can, with practice, become a steady unflinching gaze, the religious and the secular worlds are seen to be entwined, to be embracing each other, and the concept of evil itself is exposed as a consequence of over-believing any one of a plethora of mistaken metaphysical narratives.
However, some would sooner murder the infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires, as Blake observed. Some would crucify the bearer of the news that freedom lies in abandoning the old and failed ideas which form the soil out of which desires spring. But, in examining the roots of desire and belief, we might notice that the soil itself is thus contaminated by human error, and set about sifting that soil, that we might begin to re-nurture our own beliefs.
There is a particular way of approaching the world, of negotiating it and all
that is in it, which can guide one through the mistaken perceptions which prejudices and overheld beliefs blind one to. Being thus unblinded, all those who cast off their self-imposed blinds perceive of a similar world, paradoxically as close to the real, objective world as, I think, we can know.
Jung might have called this shared view ‘the collective unconscious’; Buddhists perhaps might call it the Dharma Boy of the Buddha. The veil itself has been named the Veil of Maya, and the Bible describes a glass through which we see but darkly. Perhaps it is, too, this veil, Nietzsche’s Apollonian un-tethered from the Dionysian—the Apollonian surface sheen which obfuscates and isolates the unruly earthiness of the Dionysian. But all cultures, it seems, have had a glimpse into the reality that dwells beneath surface image, and that reality is not, as Jacques Lacan, that pessimistic Freudian obfuscator would have it, a nihilistic void, but instead it is the exhilarating sea air of pure potentiality; the potentiality of the infant; of the creative imagination; of the acorn which contains the unfolding potential of an oak tree.
In this glimpse beyond, which can, with practice, become a steady unflinching gaze, the religious and the secular worlds are seen to be entwined, to be embracing each other, and the concept of evil itself is exposed as a consequence of over-believing any one of a plethora of mistaken metaphysical narratives.
However, some would sooner murder the infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires, as Blake observed. Some would crucify the bearer of the news that freedom lies in abandoning the old and failed ideas which form the soil out of which desires spring. But, in examining the roots of desire and belief, we might notice that the soil itself is thus contaminated by human error, and set about sifting that soil, that we might begin to re-nurture our own beliefs.
We're all acorns, so to speak, I think. 