THE NAKED ANIMAL

Every meditation or self transformation course, seminar or workshop I've experienced in my lifelong search for inner and outer peace has urged the development of one essential skill: neutrality. Supposedly there is an integral power to a neutral viewpoint that allows one to make decisions that are beneficial to the whole rather than to one side or the other.

Yet I've always felt an essential disconnect between the neutral zone and the world of action. When I find myself in a neutral state, whether through meditation or any other semi-conscious equilibrium management technique, I feel all-encompassing as well as completely isolated, and the urge to speak or act in any way whatsoever escapes me. Being neutral feels good because things don't bother you, but in order to reach that state, you have to step back far enough from the turning cogs to see that the whole machine really doesn't matter in the long run; and when you do that, the impetus to oil the moving parts and keep the factory running on schedule to meet market demand disappears. At least in my experience. If one lives in a quantum universe, how can one truly care about which side of the quantum envelope is opened as possibility becomes reality?

It seems impossible to decide what to do once one realizes one can do anything.
The sum of knowledge is the gap between what you know and what you know you don't.
The actions of commerce take place on the battlefield between ethics and economy.
The commerce of actions takes place between self concern and the good of the many.
Life is a fusion of matter and spirit that partakes of both but understands neither.
The mind is a wall between reality and illusion on which one scribbles grafitti.
Language is a technology we use both to create and to fend off the great unknown.
Even our most expansive theories can't untie the original knot of creation.
God is not an answer. All is one is not an answer. There are no answers.
Life is a fusion of matter and spirit that depends on caressing the conundrum.
It is lived most fully in the space between this and that, which has no name.

Meanwhile, the waking world demands that thoughts be named, decisions made and actions taken to further goals. So I think I'll decide to take a walk to clear my head--if only that were possible!

On second thought, who says caressing the conundrum is not sufficient action in and of itself? I think I'll instead spend my time more thoroughly investigating a blog I've just found that delights in the unabashed, non-stop caressing of the conundrum: Visible Origami.

Go ahead, live the paradox. Intuit the unknown. Quantify the void. Weave the mystery. Dislodge the mote in the unseeing eye.

And to all a good night.

Categories: philosophy, meaning, mysteries