A Time to Live

There comes a time when you have had enough of “learning” and feel a deep need for “experience”.

I seem to have dipped my toes into every exotic corner of human endeavor over the decades and probably have a pretty good feel for what is out there.

“Out there” in the sense of human learning, intellect, endeavor.  Philosophy, psychology, religion, physics.  Biology, chemistry, law and finance. Computers and artificial intelligence. The vastness of human knowledge in the 21st Century means that we can only have a glancing appreciation of each such subject, nonetheless this enough to make us aware, to know that others know.  Even if our own knowledge of other’s specializations can only be skin deep.

I have not needed to know where every sparrow fell.  But I have needed to know what we know; in general terms.

I now feel a deep need to know what we do not know. We are like goldfish in a bowl: our limited senses and intellect must surely shield us from much of what is truly out there in reality. If there is such a thing as reality. If reality is not created by our own thoughts.

My mind is choc a bloc with everything from the nature of time to magic mushrooms. From my conviction in the futility of conventional religion to my faltering attempts to code machine learning algorithms.

A time comes perhaps when you should turn to the experiential and leave, for a while at least, the intellectual.

If the adult brain has plasticity, then I want proof.  I can write without effort and so I will carry on. But with an obsessive mind unable to multitask, further intellectual research has to be dropped while I find out for myself whether I can “change my mind”.

Recently for instance I have been “experiencing” art without thinking about it.  Sitting in front of the London Mustaba or Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast to see what they have to say to me, while taking care not to dig to deep into what such works say to others. Not to dig, as I am won’t, into the intellectual; to eschew the learned historians of art in favor of my own raw feelings.

It is time to “feel” the universe for myself. To cease to see it through the words of others and to experience it directly.