A thought today - my concept of experience

Experience is that which does not make sense, it is the multiplicity that is synthesised into simplicity by our understanding. But experience itself cannot ever make sense.
That is the folly of all mankind: to attempt to make sense from what does not make sense, to attempt to craft reason from what cannot come true.
And yet this folly is inevitable; our life does not consist in avoiding it. We cannot just leave reason behind. It is by definition not possible to exist where things do not make sense. And yet we do seem to have an awareness of the limits of our sense and our reason; it would appear to be here that we exist, here that our hearts can live and breathe. The is no supersession of reason, and there is no doing away with the senselessness of our lives. We must eternally struggle to make sense out of this senselessness, to make our pillows of experience, to soften the blow of raging otherness beneath our cherished reasonings and notions. And yet somehow something else seems possible; it is here, neither in reason nor in foolishness, that we find ourselves mostly, and which constitutes all the fullness of our lives.

Some things I used to think

I am not quite sure what I think and feel about this new enterprise that I'm embarking upon (blogging!). Perhaps it represents a big change from what I would have done before - I used just think my thoughts and write them down in silence. Hopefully I can find some continuity with 'before', though; some measure of reality within this newness; some semblance of selfhood on the internet!

In this spirit, I write out here some things that I had written before. I am not sure how I feel about them now; in think perhaps they are like historical documents, not of 'me' but of a person like any other - like you or me! - who is suffering and trying to speak. This stuttering now finds publication, years after its stammer was heard but only after its spirit has vanished, transformed into something different, and new.

I used to think this:

Life is suffering: meaning is just looking at it.

17^th January 2008

My feeling about this now is that perhaps life is other things too. What is real is not suffering, but the lacerated warmth of my desire, my striving hope for something more to be here - and which is already itself the realisation of its desire, only that what it needs is not a thing that is outside of it, but just to be in the activity of being with its desire itself:

There is no happiness at the end of the rainbow; our only happiness is in searching along this rainbow road of life!


Another old one from my store room:

Ask me who I am, and I cannot answer.  Ask, however, where I have been, and in the winding hills and valleys of my words you will have your reply.

8^th December 2007

See now, this one is really quite life affirming. How did I write this alongside the one above (about suffering)? I have been selfconscious before about this sort of sentimentality, but now I think that it's necessary. It is not the truth - it is not a substitute for the actual process of journeying (which is described in this fragment here) - but it is a 'moment' of the totality of the truth, of the human life lived in and through the truth.


I think that's enough for now. More stuff later - maybe...

This is my first post...

<<Insert profound reflection about the nature of blogging>>

Oops, seems to have gone missing. I guess I'll live.