I’m horridly impulsive with my writing, I wanna start one way but I end up with another, Thank God for blogs …
“Picture a wave in the ocean. You can see it, measure it, its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. And it’s there. And you can see it, you know what it is. It’s a wave. …. And then it crashes in the shore and it’s gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be, for a little while”
An extremist (I would have said a frantic fanatic but dignity) in nature (or trauma, take your pick) whenever I am into something, I eat, drink, and live IT. The Buddhists speak of past lives, I’m telling ya’ I had a few of those already.
In one, I was up to my ears in philosophy. The life of the mind they call it; with an almost complete detachment from planet Hooman (human in dog language), and that sacred/ bizarre quest to un-riddle riddles that have been taunting/ haunting my brain since 2nd grade.
For years my routine was to get up, read, study, and write (in that order). I’d hibernate in a café for hours, head down, steaming coffee in one hand as the other swiftly worked those pages, taking breaks only to cram down a Pain Au Chocolat or a Religieuse. Needless to say, I have piles of written articles collecting inches of dust, and I don't intend to un-dust them anytime soon.
A random dude: what a shame Lana, you should publish those
Lana (the wise version): Nope, it served its purpose, besides, I no longer hold the same convictions
The dude: edit them then, you can’t just throw years of work in the bin
Lana (now feeling the depth of my immense wisdom): I have learned that we speak too soon and too confidently, I don’t have much interest in debate/ arguments anymore, who am I – no lack of confidence – to preach to the world, I would rather live my truth, let that speak and whoever is interested will listen
The dude with indignation: that is the epitome of defeat/ passivity
Lana: sure why not, call it passivity, I no care (goofy smile), labels/ definitions don’t hold much ground for me anymore ..... they are too cliché’ and cliché’ is boring.
Impatient dude: you saying we should all just bite our tongues or shut up
Lana: nope, to each their own. But I ain’t biting my tongue for anyone amigo, I am just not that interested
I find that more and more the word “intellectual” has become a vocation or a profession rather than a state of being or way of living. So today, and after rubbing elbows with both spiritual and thought leaders, I tend to take words like “intellectual”, “leader” …etc with a grain of salt, for although I was fortunate – and forever grateful – to have been tutored by great minds, truth be told, the people who have impacted me the most, and redefined what being wise, knowledgeable and inspired (yep those folks exist, and no they don’t live in a cave somewhere in the Himalaya) is. are the people who show up to the world as themselves, living their truths, doing what they do (regardless of what that was), walking their own walk and talking their own talk. Don’t get me wrong I still obsessively listen to my personal heroes (Noam Chomsky anyone), but only like reading a great book, now I am more into the human experience with its intricacies, even mishaps and folly (remember it is all in the eye of the beholder). I want it all, the extent of it: spiritually, physically …etc, tangled in one exquisite chunk I can munch on and on.
If Al Ghazali was ever on Vogue
Back when I studied Al Ghazzali (those glorious days), a twenty something, so full of my own version of the world, I was stricken by the concept of perception - was all the rage back then - and how little I knew, something I would later re-visit with Immanuel Kant
Suffice it to say, Kant’s ideas on perception were foundational in forming modern Western thought, even though our chap Al Ghazali beat him to it hundreds of years before
long story short, it is as relevant today as it was back then (is there anything EVER new under the sun?). Anywhere I go I hear people - and with Newtonian conviction - utter such rhetoric as (I only believe what my eyes/ senses could see), (This is a bunch of bullshit, stories people invented to understand the world), (yeah, I believed in that when I was a lil kid, but now I think it’s laughable), (now we have science, we don’t need God – still a mystery as to what that has to do with anything).
I love a good debate/ discussion. I love going deep and thinking loud, yet I generally abstain from such arguments, not mainly because I believe in the live – let – live mantra, which I do, but because logical fallacies annoy the heck out of me.
So here is a poor summary of Al Ghazali’s pearls of wisdom (I speak from memory, I hope Al Ghazali doesn’t turn in his grave):
Humans have solidified the belief that the senses are the most reliable/ even sole source of truth. And that what you see/ hear/ feel reflects the exact reality in space of that of which you see/ hear and feel. And although science has almost made a mockery of such claims, they are still alive and kicking, and deemed “science-based – I know beats me too” … worse of all they are considered the source of TRUTH for so many people.
By the way, I am totally differentiating between truth and knowledge/ info, because they are not one and the same. The senses connect/ introduce you to the world (knowledge), but they cannot produce meaning/ depth, they are also biased and somewhat unreliable (but not wrong) as we will see. Truth is what you live by and answer to.
Al ghazali used the metaphor of a cup that 2 hoomans are staring at. In their mind they are seeing the exact same thing, in their mind is also the conviction that what they both see – each believing their version to be it - is the cup as it sits in space and time. Yet the reality is that light, angle, eyesight…etc determine so much of what we see, that both people end up having two different versions of the same cup. What’s more, they are both probably wrong and if you bring a third hooman, this hooman will produce his own portrait of the cup. Question now: who knows what the cup actually is/ looks like, aka the truth of that cup without bias or alteration?
In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant argues that space and time are merely formal features of how we perceive objects, not things in themselves that exist independently of us, or properties or relations among them. Objects in space and time are said to be “appearances”, and he argues that we know nothing of substance about the things in themselves of which they are appearances.
Because cups are of no interest to me, let’s copy and paste that to EVERYTHING, and instead of senses we have logic/ brain ...etc and instead of that poor cup we have ideas or what we may call “how we live our lives”
If you’ve read so far thank you … not to be a party pooper, I gotta stop here and will continue this in another post.