Thinking In Vain
An email exchange developed between the three of us. What is the relationship between the origin, the durability of religion — and our fear of the unknown? There’s a great deal of the unknown, an ocean of it. Does the unknown have a far shore?
The thought experiment was posed: Consider the difference — if humankind were to explore to the over-the-horizon shore of the unknown? What if we could retrieve “the answer” to any of the questions which we have conceived? And what if we no longer had any remaining unanswered question? What then?
Would that barely conscious disquiet, that fear of the unknown evaporate, dissipate like fog in a warming sunlight? What if we no longer found ourselves thinking in vain?
If our unanswered query of why were no longer to be asked?
What of priest-craft, the alchemy of ritual, the resignation, and the hubris of religion… All of that would give way to?
Or would any of it?
‘I was thinking, and thinking
in vain,
how it was that I was brought to such extremity.
Would my parents have wished me to be so poor?
Heaven overspreads all without any partial feeling,
and so does Earth sustain all;
– would Heaven and Earth make me so poor
with any unkindly feeling?
I was trying to find out who had done it,
and I could not do so.
But here I am in this extremity!
—it is what was appointed for me!‘
—Zhuangzi, The Great and Most Honored Master trans. by James Legge
How about a tune, to begin a new week? This one seems a perfect fit for us! On The Dark Side By John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band
On The Dark Side
(from “Eddie And The Cruisers” soundtrack)
By John Cafferty & The Beaver Brown Band
The dark side’s coming now, nothing is real
She’ll never know just how I feel
From out of the shadows, she walks like a dream
Make me feel crazy, make me feel so mean
Ain’t nothin’ gonna save ya from a love that’s blind
Slip through the dark side and cross that line
On the dark side, oh yeah
On the dark side, oh yeah
Dark side’s coming, now nothing is real
She’ll never know just how I feel
From out of the shadows, she walks like a dream
Make me feel crazy, make me feel so mean
Ain’t nothin’ gonna save ya from a love that’s blind
Slip through the dark side and cross that line
On the dark side, oh yeah
On the dark side, oh yeah
Ain’t nothin’ gonna save ya from a love that’s blind
Slip through the dark side and cross that line
On the dark side, oh yeah
On the dark side, oh yeah
On the dark side, oh yeah
On the dark side, oh yeah
2 thoughts on “Thinking In Vain”
As I had noted in a portion of our email exchange, I believe that curiosity is one of the driving life forces of the human animal. Watch a toddler and you will soon be aware that curiosity is leading this tiny person to explore their surroundings, to begin to verbalize, to feel, to touch, to see and hear. The world is new to them and they have an innate desire to decipher that world.
Us critters also appear to have other interests, perhaps behaviors that begin to manifest themselves as we adjust to our surroundings. Some these characteristics are of a positive nature such as love, creativity, and a desire to communicate with our fellow humans. Other behaviors are of a less savory nature such as lust, greed, envy, and a hunger for power.
My fear is that once we have extinguished the flame of curiosity by finding ways of answering the currently unanswerable questions, when that far shore has been reached, we’ll be left with the darker side of human nature. Of course this is dependent of our ability to survive the millennia between now and then (whenever that might be) but I wonder if we will evolve enough to overcome the baser instincts that currently drive us towards self-destruction in this age of both mindless cruelty and this irrational thirst for power and wealth .
I hope we might evolve in a new direction, but as is always my wont, I remain cynically pessimistic about our ability to self-correct.
Evolving? I take the term to mean adapting to a given context of external circumstance, a bent for survival. I am confident this will continue until we are overtaken by the accelerating change of the social environment, the monster we did not know was our child, until too late… In any case I expect there will be pockets of homo sapiens that never purchased a ticket to ride the bullet train of “prosperity.” By serendipity they will represent us, we ghosts of past “civilizations.”
I do not think that homo sapiens can be other than the inner conflict between order, empathy and chaos, violence. The ancient Greeks took the measure of humans and created tragedy as a theatrical art form.