Open Minds

Failing to find an explaination in knowledge I began to search for it inlife, hoping to find it in the people around me. I began to observe how these people like myself lived, and how they delt with the question that led me to dispair.

And this is what I discovered among people whose position in life, as regards education and lifestyle, was similar to my own.

I found that these people of my circle had four methods of escape from the dreadful situation in which we all find ourselves.

The first method of escape is that of ignorance. It consists of failing to recognize, or understand, that life is evil and absurd. The majority of the people of this kind are either women, or very young, or very stupid and have not yet understood the problem of life that presented itself to Schopenhauser, Soloman, and Buddha. They see neither the dragon that is waiting for them, nor the mice that are gnawing away at the bush from which they are clinging, and they lick the drops of honey. But they only lick them for a while: something will turn their attention to the dragon and the mice and the licking will come to an end. There was nothing I could learn from them for we can never cease knowing what we know.

Wow … lots of stuff here to chew on. A side interest of mine for the last few years has been macro economics and the housing market in particular. It became clear to me that something was wrong with the state of affairs when an engineer could not afford to buy even a modest condo in San Diego county. So, I left knowing that life was better elsewhere and it wasn’t worth my time to wait for the situation to right itself. People like my parents and certain friends were like these ignorant people. I think they all stopped licking their honey in the last year!!!

Currrent events aside, I am struck by that last sentence that says that we cannot cease knowing what we know. This brings to mind the root cause of why I cannot simply just join with all the other lemmings in church, even though I might wish to. I cannot simply forget the key events which have transpired in my past and have shaped who I am today. The events of my life are in direct conflict with some very key tennants in Christian thought and this will forever cause problems for me. One of the things I would ask God if given the chance is to know the meaning of the parable of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. I sometimes wonder if the search for knowledge that Tolstoy and people like him embark on is really something evil and someting to be avoided! For whatever reason, God didn’t want them eating from that tree. I’d REALLY like to know why. Perhaps knowledge really isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. And the real downer is that knowledge is a one way street. You just can’t go from enlightenment to ignorance.