Weltanschaung

The Philosopher’s Stone

zenothestoic@protonmail.ch

Tag: Learning

  • To every thing there is a season.

    To every thing there is a season.

    There is a season for learning and a season to realize you know enough.

    I recently came across Jordan Peterson and swiftly realized that for me at least it was another day, another guru.

    I seem to have reached a period of deep contentment and I really have no need of any more grand theories of everything.  Nor do I wish to be told how to run my life.

    There is a whole long list of things I don’t need. And things I don’t need to know. There is much that I would like to know but in my already long life, I have come to realize that I will never know such things. Perhaps because they are unknowable.

    So contentment is walking along a sunlit beach on the scruffy coast of East Kent. Contentment is not giving a damn what you look like or what you possess. Listening to psalms or to the divine music of a 16th Century catholic priest.

    Contentment is doing simple things, in simple ways. Bumbling along growing “stuff” in a garden.

    Hearing the unearthly squeal of  buzzards overhead, watching a cormorant dive or a seal pop its head above the water.

    The honest truth is that deep down I have never much cared for anything except such simplicity, such quiet and profound moments of peace as are to be found minding one’s own business and trundling along life’s path.

    I was gently accused of nihilism in my last post but I am guilty of the desire not to destroy or to negate but simply to ignore.

    There is not much I am fussed about, that is all. I don’t care what the busy fools in parliament are saying and I certainly don’t care about anyone or anything one might find discussed in the Financial Times.

    Strange to relate I am more interested in catching glimpses of the ineffable than filling my mind with another’s thoughts or worrying about the state of the nation.

    To every thing there is a season.

  • A Time to Live

    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.