Irony is reserved to the Jaded.
I mean, one can do toilet jokes indefinitely, or wonder all day (all week?) whether Barry Bonds will
Already you conflate 'Consciousness' with man-religio symbols like 'soul' - YAN casualty of all topics which cannot provide, thus exchange any sensual/sense-able? Referents. 'Certainty' - has no validity (which I can identify) beyond the proofs of certain mathematical axia == by definition, within that closed-continuum. Even protons decay - only various named-forms of Energy packets exist, but these are always in motion too.
"Believers" speak of their Certainty, of course. All undefinable, untransferrable and in the end: unSpeakable. (Not that that stops late-night preachers, such as they are / such as 'we' are. Brownian noise?) We are accustomed to Belief-in the immutability of concepts like
causality and ... we think that, with all that 'daily' experience - we grok
time 'adequately'; yet still ID 'Eternity' as merely, "a very long time!" Little wonder that 11-dimensional space transmits few useful hand-holds to the non-mathematician.
Yet Einstein clearly grokked metaphysical scales when he uttered, [from mem, so ~]
"Problems created at one level of thinking cannot be solved at the same level (from which) they were created." Ditto his relativistic Uncertainty Principle for math, "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. Then there's an item saved, all unlinked:
Einstein on the Mysterious
The following paragraph is the conclusion to the essay "The World as I See It," which is taken from the abridged edition of
Einstein's book bearing the same title. In the abridged edition (Philosophical Library, New York, 1949), the essay appears on
pp. 1-5.
The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery--even if mixed with fear-that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only
accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms-it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious
attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his
creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls. Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvellous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavour to comprehend a portion, be it never so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.
I deem Einstein's expressions among the most incisive I've ever encountered, within ordinary language, and accessible to Westerners and their ~logical positivism. These seem prose-poems if not even, Western koans.
In the End (or in some class of shared-Ends amidst those who have Noticed this peculiarity of our 'Existence') is not the Largest Mystery\ufffd ... the simplest?
"The Fact that there is 'anything' at all"
(also: "noticeable by 'anything at all'" - for those demanding regression exercises.)
((but then, Leibnitz comes along for ~nothingness: a mind sitting in a dark room and seeing things happen on a screen? -- rendering the physical world evanescent if not nonexistent. Ah but - where'd that 'mind' come from?))
On my tee shirt resides AE's, "Imagination is More Important than Knowledge." I note that many gurus, with reverence for their Teachers - describe a certain similarity of Experience, at some stage of their growth. Phrased (close-enough to) "I am abandoning The System..."
[Whatever was The System, prior to dispensing with same.]
Oh and - the main reason they 'Teach' the various ways that they do -- is because all Students are so 'formatory' in mindset that -- they need to hear The Same Stuff! over and over and
So then - we go on Wondering, aware -even-as-fledglings- that Certainty can never be attained, nor Knowledge ever made 'complete'. As AE observes: when you cease active Wondering [/AE] you might as well become a full-Repo, take up golf, watch Tee Vee and go to seed. Right?
And
if we are a part of some gigundo, ongoing ever-altering Organism, of which
Gaia represents Terra?
(and for which/Whom? we have created planet-suicidal Bizness / its infinite-Consumption mantra <-> as Opposing Force to Truth of any ilk) why, then and In Fact - We Are Parts-of-God and need no longer play, Mine's Bigger. We are such
Narcissistic babies, here.(Should I somehow manage to become a Fully Conscious Being (via whatever Rose as smells as sweet) I promise not to Tell You All About It and How to Get There.) For all Reasons extant, eh? :-)
Happy, but none-too-Certain.. Ponderings,
I Who Be, sorta
