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Current mood:  hopeful
Freedom As already completed, the past can't be otherwise. Indeed, who has not heard, "Don't cry over spilled milk"? But why do we still need to learn this: of all the things I already have done in my life, none of them could I have not done. I did them! Any other explanation gives me an alibi, pretends that I wasn't there.
But, this does not make us victims, for this is anything but a fatalism. In fact, this is the freedom of humanity.
We are not simply "in" time as a stone is. We are not merely pushed along from behind. We can 'call back' to ourselves from the future. Actually, strange as it sounds, what we normally call the future is in fact the past. Again: what we call the future is just as equally a past we still are moving toward; it is that past which is not-yet-but-will-have-been.
As something already past, Mozart could not not have composed Don Giovanni & the Beatles could not not have made "Abbey Road." What does this mean? It means that we can move out toward acts which, once performed, could not not have been done. In this way, we are free to move toward the past, free to sentence ourselves to its irrevocability.
In summary: we are moving, whether we realize it or not, toward that past which is not-yet but which will-have-been. Moreover, once our decisions or deeds are finally completed, we could not have done otherwise.
To recognize these is to dwell in human freedom. Thought A "world" without thought would be less real than a world without sight, sound, or touch. But, what is thought? For starters, trying to define thought would be like trying to see your acts of seeing. Thought, that is, is not a mere thing in the world; it is the source, form, and continuity of all things.
We literally think our worlds into existence. How many things are there without thought? None: "Things" is a concept This means that without thought there is neither "you" nor "me," nor even "world." There is nothing that could be thought of. This also means there is no "we" independent of thought, and certainly not a we who is doing the thinking.
Can I ever find, as Krishnamurti might ask, the 'I' between two thoughts? That is, see if you can find a thinker who, remaining wholly unthought of, thinks thoughts. Whenever I find a thinker, the thinker is always "within" a thought. Said plainly, it is not that we think thoughts, but rather, it is thought that thinks us.
Thought is not our own, it is the world's. That is, thought doesn't think itself; it is the world that thinks. We, each of us, are the places and moments by which the world thinks.
All said and done, the world thinks itself into existence by thinking thoughts of thinkers thinking about the world.
World Alan Watts once said, "Just as trees flower, so the world peoples." But still, on the other hand, doesn't the world bloom out from people? That is, Watts equally could have said, "Just as trees flower, so people world." Obviously, people don't exist indpendent of the world. Less obviously, the world does not exist independent of people.
Let's get this straight: you and I are not the world, and yet, we are not not it either! As living beings, we are, miraculously, something the world is doing to itself. Each one of us is a distinct place and moment by which the world becomes conscious of itself; we are the world's way of gaining self-awareness. This means that we encounter the world by forgetting that we are never simply, only, ourselves. By pretending that we are not the world, we haunt the world as an Other.
Ever really noticed that you don't have a face? Look for yourself. Your face is gone, visually absent. It is like a world-flooding hole, a rip that lets the world pour through. When D. E. Harding first noticed this, he stated:
This hole where my head should have been, was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing…It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything--room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills.
To be without a face is to be an opening of the world; it is to be that part of the world which 'makes room' for itself.
12:35 PM
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