| Hats off to the Chinese! |
| Another thought crossed my head as I was in the shower this morning. I was thinking of the Taoist sages and their seemingly impossible contradictory statements when it hit me like a load of bricks: the key to maintaining your center is in realizing that you must assume absolute flexibility. The ability to maintain a multitude of differing perspectives on the same issue will enable you to free yourself of a narrow mind and a lack of potential. There are two types of contradictions: imagined (false perspective, false outlook) and real (true and real contradictions). The first concerns a perspective that is not realized, and not fully comprehended. It has a basis in truth, but is extended beyond what the person has experience of. It is a generalization, a stereotype, an extended claim rooted not in the world but in one's limited understanding of the world. It is a contradiction because that perspective goes against another world view that is contradictory. You may have had a bad experience eating lasagna, but you later realized that you didn't like the way it was prepared. Good, lesson learned. But you also had a bad experience with shark meat, and you refuse to eat it again even though you heard others complain of how poorly it was prepared. You let the strength of a singular encounter dominate your world-view, and you are a poorer man because of it. The second contradiction is a necessary one because both are true and false at the same time. The world is both monistic and dualistic. Each is absolutely true, and at the same time absolutely false. The world can be seen in both ways, and both views shed insight into the nature of things. But they are only concepts that enable one's perspective, not one's that limit perspective. As such, all concepts are absolutely false, but the first kind of contradictions show that the falsity is achieved through lack of unity, lack of proper coming together of the soul. The first contradiction is a failure to comprehend the complexity of the universe and the inherent weakness of our own individual knowledge of it. The second contradiction is a willingness to entertain the lack of essential nature in our own conceptions. Our conceptions are nothing more than windows, and what seems to be contradictions turn out to be complementary angles that result in a greater understanding that cannot be seen directly. Where is the soul? Is it in your memories? Is it in your personality? Is it in your body? Is it in the chain of codependent origination which has allowed all things to come to be as they are without anyone's say on the matter? Is it a bubble of white light, or a flurry of chemical and biological associations that boggle scientists? All of it! None of it! Yes! No! Maybe! And so on. Once you name it, you limit it. You essentialize and go past your own understanding in making a claim. You lose your center. That is how you some people fall, because they let their mind tell them where their center is. To help clarify this: my sister and I recently got into an argument concerning the proper way our post-industrial society should interact with the environment. The dispute concerned this: how do you measure the worth of a tree? Do you measure it by the value of the goods it produces for us as people (aka lumber, sap, fruit et cetera)? Do you measure it by its value in the ecosystem in terms of its importance to the soil and to the inhabitants? Do you measure it by its artistic value, or its sentimental value? Isn't it wrong to give the tree a monetary value, because that takes the tree apart from its own environment? Yes and no (annoyed at that answer? get used to it!). Giving a living thing a monetary value is an abomination because it puts everything into a narrow perspective of our human wants (and our selfish human perspective). But if you can find a way to take into account all the many factors that go into a tree's value, such as its value to the ecosystem, its value aesthetically, and so on, then the price will reflect its real value, not just to us, but to our understanding of its value to the world. Lumber companies have realized they cannot cut trees down indefinitely, but must replace the cut trees with several planted trees to replace them. The new environments will be (with time) a suitable replacement that will provide homes for all sorts of animals. Now that takes work, and a lot of money, because the trees need to be planted with care and need time and proper management to create a suitable ecosystem. Some forests will be off-limits because their value will be too high aesthetically or sentimentally. We need nature reserves because we need to counter-balance our own pollution and frequent lack of concern for the environment. We will make mistakes, we always do, but we must take that into account with our actions. The newly planted forests won't produce trees that are as healthy as those 10th generation trees in much older forests. But we will learn from those mistakes, and will correct our false contradictions while we embrace our real ones. This is not a synthesis, not by any means, of the former contradiction in views. It is still wrong to put monetary values on living things, and we still need to do so. But we are embracing both impossibilities and acting in a way that does not essentialize. It is sheer practicality, because it achieves unity through recognition that unity cannot be achieved through a larger world-view that would essentialize and reduce the potency of both sides. So it must be, because there is no alternative that does not end in narrow-mindedness and the stagnation of the spirit. Adios, The Dark Dachshund Back to my Homepage |