Beautiful! Isn't it? The contrast between Hegel and Socrates? Socrates' art lied in defining within himself the limits of what he knew and the vast unknown -- the difference between himself and the world constituted by that knowledge, and the world out there to be known or never to be known here. He knew what he knew and what he did not and therein lied his wisdom. Who now knows how to delineate those beautiful shapes of his soul knowing that all was illuminated within those boundaries by the effulgent knowledge reflected off his self-knowing spirit -- that a reflection of the Absolute Spirit -- and that all around were a great shadow to be illuminated by the spiritual expansion of the soul. Or to be known for what it is -- a shadow of the Great Unknowable. He is a rare man today that does so, striving in the memory of a rare man from a rare age.
So when I begin on a task of writing that which is new but always-already-written in every word that has been written, I am a pioneer blazing in the trail of the stars just as the birds that fly the whole distance of earth guided by the invisible magnetic fields. Every beginning is a renewal. Man tills the same earth every year for a new season of fruits. Suppose a man in a hypothetically absolute isolation, pondering the meaning of physics and metaphysics, soul and spirit, sleep and memory, world and divinity, encounters Aristotle's researches. What should be the color of his feelings? He should rejoice in finding a fellow traveler. But if he feel ill-will and envy then he would be treacherous to the scientific spirit. It has been said that a true meditator is one who is capable of solitude in crowd and is full of company in the loneliest desolation. He is always his own self and belongs to himself totally and utterly. He is not divided by the self and the other. He is at one with himself -- at the origin, undivided and absolute. Who can rob him of his joy? His consciousness of it is only redoubled at what would engender jealousy -- the schizophrenic stage of human potential -- in another. He is not a lacerated spirit but a truly healed one. He rejoices at finding a fellow researcher in his quest for and a fellow traveler in his journey towards truth. This is the will to coincidence that is the essence of all human movement -- spiritual and physical. This essence is also known as love. It inexorably seeks its object and attaches itself to it. In its highest and purest form it coincides with its object to the erasure of all distinction, all differentiation. The quest for knowledge, for that which is true and indestructible, is love. And it welcomes all aids, human and divine, that take it to its beloved. Socrates demonstrated this through his life and word. It is desire -- the soul force that inhabits the cell and atom of every animate and inanimate being -- the unmanifest law that governs the world. The craving that forces the tissue to seek its satisfaction, the hunger that drives the animal towards food, the investigative power that causes Einstein to ceaselessly search for the invisible physical beauty of his world.
Only in the true seeker after truth and the honest lover does it act in its purity. Every moment of the quest is a joy unto them -- even beholding the beloved dreaming beatifically in the arms of another. She is beautiful in the arms of that other and lends him of her beauty, when beheld by the truth-tinted eyes of the honest lover. She is unto him the statue of child Jesus in the arms of the virgin, carved into eternity by a sacred love, whose beauty is elusive to profane eyes. He bears no ill-will or jealousy towards the one the world called his rival. He only sees in them what he had been desiring all along -- his beloved in the state of blissful union. He is capable of uniting with her platonically -- through that other man -- through herself alone. She is his unconditional blissfulness. And he is always praying and working for her bliss; perpetually in a state of union with her. She is by him the most in his solitude -- and then there is silence.No more is said; nothing need be uttered. The skies hear it, the dead hear it, the birds, the brooks, the trees and ... she rains over him and soaks him as a pregnant dark cloud, as Zeus over Leda.
That is all to him. He has loved and is contented. Not for him the disconsolate sighs of unreciprocated love. He coos to those who can hear and is oblivious of the oblivious. He is done with the past and the future. He is alive to what is right now. Creation sings through his merry voice.
***
I have my share of time. And I am not my ancestor or my posterity. Neither do I care to be. I am the carefree nightingale that will warble its song to no one in particular. Sufficient unto today are the worries of this day. My daily bread awaits to be earned very hard. I live in my vegetable garden and the world is too big a place for me. And eternity too long a stretch of time. I care not overmuch for this world, nor for the cares of this world. It did not begin with me, it shall not end with me. The centuries and the millenia never asked to be inaugurated. And the world shall not herald it once again with false trumpets to a solitary. And if it did, I was never called to be that man. (Thanked be the Lord that I know it.) The birds and the seas will once again and inevitably beckon the night with its stars without my witness to this overflowing logic of time. As the joker has said -- the show shall go on with or without us. My wishes are but humility itself. Did the world ever ask itself,"Oh! What shall become of me without him?" For what shall become of it without me? It will not perish. But neither will I without it. I do not need the world to exist, just as it does not need me to exist. I do not live in the fear of this duality for I am imperishable as every particle that is born and burnt out. That which is has always been and will always be. World without end. Amen.
Everything shall ever and anon flow out of the fiery loins of eternity into the womb of time and into the fire it shall pass again. The game of dust and ashes and the Phoenix will cease. But I shall still exist for I have found out that I am indestructible. I am that which the thief cannot steal, fire destroy, or the ocean erase. I am the Self. And still! I am not the King or the Father of this world. And it is not the burden that my shoulders were made to carry. That I find myself in the world is all I seek. That I find what is relevant to my individuality in the poet's noble rapture is all I seek. My limbs are not great enough to wrap themselves around the world. It is enough for me that I embrace my destiny with all the warmth I possess in my soul.
A man wakes up in the morning and the sun waits for him. And the earth to till; the fields and the cattle to be tended. His wife and children to be loved and the warbling birds and brooks and the rustling leaves in the breeze to be heard. A man wakes up in the morning; his daily bread to be earned. His lungs to fill up and expand with the fresh breath of the morning. The earth new and fragrant with last night's rain glides sweetly through his nostrils. And if he cocks his ears but right, the music of the spheres is orchestrated in every subtle chord of his being -- irradiating out of the seat of his heart into the limitless universe. He has enough in caring for himself and what is properly his. He is not a new man tomorrow with one fell stroke of his genius. The inner coat is not shed so easily. But fortunately for him the old man will always do with fidelity to new resolutions. Let the sun look over the same man when he tills the field; only there is a greater tension in his sinews and severity in his eyes this new dawn. Yes, the old material shall do alright! Not for him the subtle and profound thoughts of the intellect. Nor the inward gaze that plumbs the very depths of his being's abyss -- the gaze that has been the unreliability of human existence through history. Let him only wind his fingers ever so tight around every object that he calls to use. O yes! He shall do alright. The old farmer who has lived long enough and grown silent through ill-use and over-use knows this now, when, alas, it serves him no more worldly purpose. But he shall still profit by it. He is better for his wear and tear to die a wise death, for he knows the futility of all that transpired too deep and too hard in him. He is stiller and steadier now and death is an event of a day like a dinner, a quarrel, a chance encounter round the corner with an acquaintance, a pot breaking, lovers kissing. Just one more event to witness and withstand. Just another breath this lovely day when the world shall pass into the dark and he go his own sweet way.
They rightly call it the kiss of death as it is but a light and simple act of a being that toiled too hard under a burden too heavy. It is his wisest act whether he knows it or not. It is when his long dormant soul wakes up from the deep slumber of life and flies out floating lightly on the sustaining breeze. His soul roams free and imperially as an eagle. Away towards the sunlight. Wings spread vast in full flight, knifing through the air, casting a vaster shadow over all that crawls underneath. And over him the limitless skies, brighter and brighter as he ascends. So long as he lives let him only ensure that his old shoes are nailed properly. Let him care only for the sapling in his garden this hour. And all else, the greater matters of spirit, shall wait and rest awhile. And then when the hour comes, he will be ready for the last great flight.
When the connoisseur of art, the reader of subtleties and profundities and the thrilling, breaks out in a soulful whoop of applause, has he discerned that within him which moved him to it? Have the lovers of Lord for the safety and pleasure of their consciousness and stocks and liver managed to please Him in the purpose with which He has borne them into this world? Who is so certain that the manna shall rain over him? He can only but strive with an earnestness a degree higher than he is capable of. And that is the long and short of it -- of this our life of tragic magnitudes. The old farmer knows it through his close contact with earth. The harder his feet press down the earth as he pushes his plow onward, the stronger the earth presses against his feet. As his soles feel this pressure exerted by the ground he treads, his being struggles against a forceful and undeniable reality, the veins on his forehead stand out throbbing with the force of this reality; he is in a state too alive to ponder the vanity of his existence. More vital than the profoundest melancholia is at work within him an unconsciousness, a well spring of something that since the beginning of human history has overridden the most logical intellectual doubts, the deepest despair, the innumerable host of the most trifling misgivings. "It is so. It is so." mutters the tiller of earth as he looks up at the setting sun reddening his endless horizon. His words are not compatible with the idea of infinity but he knows that it is so, because it must be so and no otherwise. He has not sunk himself deep enough into the mire of metaphysical profundities and ethical dilemmas to be sundered from his vital roots. Through his feet and his plow he is still firmly rooted into the earth. Unlike the thinker drifting in his lofty heights, his being has not yet been uprooted from its soil, transplanted or 'unplanted' into an alien medium. His soul is nourished by his native earth, the cold air of the fields invigorates his lungs, the sweat of his brow and feet is the drink of the earth and the earth, in turn, replenishes him with the cool water welling out of it. The two drink of each other and their beings flow into one another until there is no self and other between him and his world.
It is not true to say that they melt into one another. I have never understood that metaphor. Does it imply two individual entities that are different and apart to begin with, then melt or become fluid and intermingle, retaining still their individual properties? That is, they exist in a relationship but are still aloof from each other? Or does the metaphor signify the losing of one into another, a dissolution such that the differences vanish and the entities are now one? Do they so form a new entity which is neither the one or the other, or a bit of both? We do not know. Perhaps the latter metaphor is closer to our meaning. No matter how the metaphor is meant to exemplify our hypothesis, it is irrelevant to the its description. Or perhaps, in the mystery of this metaphor lies the secret of a healthy relationship between man and his universe. It cannot be our purpose here to investigate the inner conjunctions and complexities of the structure of this relationship, but merely to know that it is and that a man need not search his way too hard out of the forest of dark confusion he has lost himself into. One just needs to accept what is and that it is good. And the inner force of life throbbing at the center of his being will align him with the natural course of reconciliation and a slow and steady resurrection. He will be steered to his destiny just as the birds are guided by the magnetic fields of the earth to their destination. That is his sole immediate need -- to have his path lit bright out of the hoary depths of the forest. And then one day, when he has regained himself, rested, he can leisurely turn the same path-illuminating lamp on the metaphor of how he lives. Because it is through that metaphor that he can understand the meaning of existence and help others to the same understanding. The dynamics of a true relationship with life -- the honest and strifeless life that he is living now. But this way there is always the snare of falling into the old error -- of sacrifying thinking beyond the legitimate ratio of the human lot. Or, this way might also lie another purposive endeavor befitting a natural and honest existence. To help himself and his fellow beings live better, to a more harmonious existence within and without, in totality, at the core of their hearts. To an understanding acceptance of life. For that he must understand himself in the simplicity of his instincts and their humble but noble balance. It is a task fraught with risk -- the ancient risk of the cultivated man. And if he sets upon it, he must negotiate his pitted road through it. Or else, let it suffice him that he has begun living once again, the first time since he was an innocent babe. Let him only remember the former desperate darkness of his life and draw peace from the fact that God's sun once upon shines its warm light upon his skin. And that he feels it and is soothed. Let him live in the sweat of his brow, in perspiration between the hot sun and the baked earth and shine kindly light through the way of his life. Let him leave the preaching to the pastor. His deed shall be his word and his life the lamp lighting the book of life in which the generations awaiting the same unlit travails shall read. Even we shall leave aside for the time being the melting metaphor that metamorphoses into another shape and structure even as we look at it and before we can fix it with its line of vision. It does not demand an immediate resolution. I and you now know the necessary condition and that is sufficient unto this moment, as it shall be to all the future ones.The man and the earth become one another. It is a force truer than gravity. That is all.
So when I begin on a task of writing that which is new but always-already-written in every word that has been written, I am a pioneer blazing in the trail of the stars just as the birds that fly the whole distance of earth guided by the invisible magnetic fields. Every beginning is a renewal. Man tills the same earth every year for a new season of fruits. Suppose a man in a hypothetically absolute isolation, pondering the meaning of physics and metaphysics, soul and spirit, sleep and memory, world and divinity, encounters Aristotle's researches. What should be the color of his feelings? He should rejoice in finding a fellow traveler. But if he feel ill-will and envy then he would be treacherous to the scientific spirit. It has been said that a true meditator is one who is capable of solitude in crowd and is full of company in the loneliest desolation. He is always his own self and belongs to himself totally and utterly. He is not divided by the self and the other. He is at one with himself -- at the origin, undivided and absolute. Who can rob him of his joy? His consciousness of it is only redoubled at what would engender jealousy -- the schizophrenic stage of human potential -- in another. He is not a lacerated spirit but a truly healed one. He rejoices at finding a fellow researcher in his quest for and a fellow traveler in his journey towards truth. This is the will to coincidence that is the essence of all human movement -- spiritual and physical. This essence is also known as love. It inexorably seeks its object and attaches itself to it. In its highest and purest form it coincides with its object to the erasure of all distinction, all differentiation. The quest for knowledge, for that which is true and indestructible, is love. And it welcomes all aids, human and divine, that take it to its beloved. Socrates demonstrated this through his life and word. It is desire -- the soul force that inhabits the cell and atom of every animate and inanimate being -- the unmanifest law that governs the world. The craving that forces the tissue to seek its satisfaction, the hunger that drives the animal towards food, the investigative power that causes Einstein to ceaselessly search for the invisible physical beauty of his world.
Only in the true seeker after truth and the honest lover does it act in its purity. Every moment of the quest is a joy unto them -- even beholding the beloved dreaming beatifically in the arms of another. She is beautiful in the arms of that other and lends him of her beauty, when beheld by the truth-tinted eyes of the honest lover. She is unto him the statue of child Jesus in the arms of the virgin, carved into eternity by a sacred love, whose beauty is elusive to profane eyes. He bears no ill-will or jealousy towards the one the world called his rival. He only sees in them what he had been desiring all along -- his beloved in the state of blissful union. He is capable of uniting with her platonically -- through that other man -- through herself alone. She is his unconditional blissfulness. And he is always praying and working for her bliss; perpetually in a state of union with her. She is by him the most in his solitude -- and then there is silence.No more is said; nothing need be uttered. The skies hear it, the dead hear it, the birds, the brooks, the trees and ... she rains over him and soaks him as a pregnant dark cloud, as Zeus over Leda.
That is all to him. He has loved and is contented. Not for him the disconsolate sighs of unreciprocated love. He coos to those who can hear and is oblivious of the oblivious. He is done with the past and the future. He is alive to what is right now. Creation sings through his merry voice.
***
I have my share of time. And I am not my ancestor or my posterity. Neither do I care to be. I am the carefree nightingale that will warble its song to no one in particular. Sufficient unto today are the worries of this day. My daily bread awaits to be earned very hard. I live in my vegetable garden and the world is too big a place for me. And eternity too long a stretch of time. I care not overmuch for this world, nor for the cares of this world. It did not begin with me, it shall not end with me. The centuries and the millenia never asked to be inaugurated. And the world shall not herald it once again with false trumpets to a solitary. And if it did, I was never called to be that man. (Thanked be the Lord that I know it.) The birds and the seas will once again and inevitably beckon the night with its stars without my witness to this overflowing logic of time. As the joker has said -- the show shall go on with or without us. My wishes are but humility itself. Did the world ever ask itself,"Oh! What shall become of me without him?" For what shall become of it without me? It will not perish. But neither will I without it. I do not need the world to exist, just as it does not need me to exist. I do not live in the fear of this duality for I am imperishable as every particle that is born and burnt out. That which is has always been and will always be. World without end. Amen.
Everything shall ever and anon flow out of the fiery loins of eternity into the womb of time and into the fire it shall pass again. The game of dust and ashes and the Phoenix will cease. But I shall still exist for I have found out that I am indestructible. I am that which the thief cannot steal, fire destroy, or the ocean erase. I am the Self. And still! I am not the King or the Father of this world. And it is not the burden that my shoulders were made to carry. That I find myself in the world is all I seek. That I find what is relevant to my individuality in the poet's noble rapture is all I seek. My limbs are not great enough to wrap themselves around the world. It is enough for me that I embrace my destiny with all the warmth I possess in my soul.
A man wakes up in the morning and the sun waits for him. And the earth to till; the fields and the cattle to be tended. His wife and children to be loved and the warbling birds and brooks and the rustling leaves in the breeze to be heard. A man wakes up in the morning; his daily bread to be earned. His lungs to fill up and expand with the fresh breath of the morning. The earth new and fragrant with last night's rain glides sweetly through his nostrils. And if he cocks his ears but right, the music of the spheres is orchestrated in every subtle chord of his being -- irradiating out of the seat of his heart into the limitless universe. He has enough in caring for himself and what is properly his. He is not a new man tomorrow with one fell stroke of his genius. The inner coat is not shed so easily. But fortunately for him the old man will always do with fidelity to new resolutions. Let the sun look over the same man when he tills the field; only there is a greater tension in his sinews and severity in his eyes this new dawn. Yes, the old material shall do alright! Not for him the subtle and profound thoughts of the intellect. Nor the inward gaze that plumbs the very depths of his being's abyss -- the gaze that has been the unreliability of human existence through history. Let him only wind his fingers ever so tight around every object that he calls to use. O yes! He shall do alright. The old farmer who has lived long enough and grown silent through ill-use and over-use knows this now, when, alas, it serves him no more worldly purpose. But he shall still profit by it. He is better for his wear and tear to die a wise death, for he knows the futility of all that transpired too deep and too hard in him. He is stiller and steadier now and death is an event of a day like a dinner, a quarrel, a chance encounter round the corner with an acquaintance, a pot breaking, lovers kissing. Just one more event to witness and withstand. Just another breath this lovely day when the world shall pass into the dark and he go his own sweet way.
They rightly call it the kiss of death as it is but a light and simple act of a being that toiled too hard under a burden too heavy. It is his wisest act whether he knows it or not. It is when his long dormant soul wakes up from the deep slumber of life and flies out floating lightly on the sustaining breeze. His soul roams free and imperially as an eagle. Away towards the sunlight. Wings spread vast in full flight, knifing through the air, casting a vaster shadow over all that crawls underneath. And over him the limitless skies, brighter and brighter as he ascends. So long as he lives let him only ensure that his old shoes are nailed properly. Let him care only for the sapling in his garden this hour. And all else, the greater matters of spirit, shall wait and rest awhile. And then when the hour comes, he will be ready for the last great flight.
When the connoisseur of art, the reader of subtleties and profundities and the thrilling, breaks out in a soulful whoop of applause, has he discerned that within him which moved him to it? Have the lovers of Lord for the safety and pleasure of their consciousness and stocks and liver managed to please Him in the purpose with which He has borne them into this world? Who is so certain that the manna shall rain over him? He can only but strive with an earnestness a degree higher than he is capable of. And that is the long and short of it -- of this our life of tragic magnitudes. The old farmer knows it through his close contact with earth. The harder his feet press down the earth as he pushes his plow onward, the stronger the earth presses against his feet. As his soles feel this pressure exerted by the ground he treads, his being struggles against a forceful and undeniable reality, the veins on his forehead stand out throbbing with the force of this reality; he is in a state too alive to ponder the vanity of his existence. More vital than the profoundest melancholia is at work within him an unconsciousness, a well spring of something that since the beginning of human history has overridden the most logical intellectual doubts, the deepest despair, the innumerable host of the most trifling misgivings. "It is so. It is so." mutters the tiller of earth as he looks up at the setting sun reddening his endless horizon. His words are not compatible with the idea of infinity but he knows that it is so, because it must be so and no otherwise. He has not sunk himself deep enough into the mire of metaphysical profundities and ethical dilemmas to be sundered from his vital roots. Through his feet and his plow he is still firmly rooted into the earth. Unlike the thinker drifting in his lofty heights, his being has not yet been uprooted from its soil, transplanted or 'unplanted' into an alien medium. His soul is nourished by his native earth, the cold air of the fields invigorates his lungs, the sweat of his brow and feet is the drink of the earth and the earth, in turn, replenishes him with the cool water welling out of it. The two drink of each other and their beings flow into one another until there is no self and other between him and his world.
It is not true to say that they melt into one another. I have never understood that metaphor. Does it imply two individual entities that are different and apart to begin with, then melt or become fluid and intermingle, retaining still their individual properties? That is, they exist in a relationship but are still aloof from each other? Or does the metaphor signify the losing of one into another, a dissolution such that the differences vanish and the entities are now one? Do they so form a new entity which is neither the one or the other, or a bit of both? We do not know. Perhaps the latter metaphor is closer to our meaning. No matter how the metaphor is meant to exemplify our hypothesis, it is irrelevant to the its description. Or perhaps, in the mystery of this metaphor lies the secret of a healthy relationship between man and his universe. It cannot be our purpose here to investigate the inner conjunctions and complexities of the structure of this relationship, but merely to know that it is and that a man need not search his way too hard out of the forest of dark confusion he has lost himself into. One just needs to accept what is and that it is good. And the inner force of life throbbing at the center of his being will align him with the natural course of reconciliation and a slow and steady resurrection. He will be steered to his destiny just as the birds are guided by the magnetic fields of the earth to their destination. That is his sole immediate need -- to have his path lit bright out of the hoary depths of the forest. And then one day, when he has regained himself, rested, he can leisurely turn the same path-illuminating lamp on the metaphor of how he lives. Because it is through that metaphor that he can understand the meaning of existence and help others to the same understanding. The dynamics of a true relationship with life -- the honest and strifeless life that he is living now. But this way there is always the snare of falling into the old error -- of sacrifying thinking beyond the legitimate ratio of the human lot. Or, this way might also lie another purposive endeavor befitting a natural and honest existence. To help himself and his fellow beings live better, to a more harmonious existence within and without, in totality, at the core of their hearts. To an understanding acceptance of life. For that he must understand himself in the simplicity of his instincts and their humble but noble balance. It is a task fraught with risk -- the ancient risk of the cultivated man. And if he sets upon it, he must negotiate his pitted road through it. Or else, let it suffice him that he has begun living once again, the first time since he was an innocent babe. Let him only remember the former desperate darkness of his life and draw peace from the fact that God's sun once upon shines its warm light upon his skin. And that he feels it and is soothed. Let him live in the sweat of his brow, in perspiration between the hot sun and the baked earth and shine kindly light through the way of his life. Let him leave the preaching to the pastor. His deed shall be his word and his life the lamp lighting the book of life in which the generations awaiting the same unlit travails shall read. Even we shall leave aside for the time being the melting metaphor that metamorphoses into another shape and structure even as we look at it and before we can fix it with its line of vision. It does not demand an immediate resolution. I and you now know the necessary condition and that is sufficient unto this moment, as it shall be to all the future ones.The man and the earth become one another. It is a force truer than gravity. That is all.
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