Use your imagination, be free.
– Patti Smith
Imagination is the most powerful force in the world. When we imagine that we love then love becomes the second most powerful force.
-Lobsang Rampa, The Third Eye
I was trying to figure something out, something that baffled me, baffled me to the core just like so many of the things going on inside of this world baffle us. It had to do with love (what else?) and specifically, I was struggling to understand why a man who felt real happiness when with a woman would prefer not to be with her(a person that purposefully avoids happiness??).
The struggling to understand carried on for weeks, long weeks ridden with total confusion and sorrow and a sense of hopelessness.
And then it hit me, it hit me like a ton of bricks, like true understanding often does, after you give up trying to understand.
Now you might think, what, did she find the reason why a person purposefully avoids happiness? She found an explanation for this absurd state of things?
Well, yes and no. (Let me say as a side topic that yes, there are people that purposefully avoid happiness, happiness may be scary as it is a game changer, what people think makes them happy varies enormously).
But my main point, the discovery if I may so call it—but hey, Socrates had warned us all along—is that we know nothing. Or, more precisely and frankly put: What the Hell do We Know.
Think about it. Ultimately, nobody could figure out Covid. Nobody can figure out love. Or why some people die just like that and other people recover from illness just like that. We still “don’t know nothin’”.
Okay, please, indulge me. I know, I know, this concept has been so over-worn that it has patches in many more places than just the elbows. And of course it’s not my discovery and I’m not trying to claim ownership of S’s hoc unum scio, me nihil scire. The thing is, one thing is having assimilated a truth in your mind, and one thing is to have it become, suddenly, something that permeates the cells in your bone marrow and goes on to modify the way your bones go about moving in the world.
So we know nothing. And how does that solve things? How does one go about the business of living when one knows nothing?
This takes us to the real epiphany, what complemented S’s discovery, what is, maybe, my own thinking:
Even if you know nothing, act as if love matters, as if God exists, as if life is fair, as if good is better than evil, as if you knew the difference between good and evil, as if it matters to the world that you do good, as if what you most desire will be yours someday.
Why? because we owe it to whomever created sunsets, flowers, babies, smiles, lasagna, the smell of sun-dried linen, the smell of rain in a garden, lake Leman, water on a hot day, hugs, best friends, butterflies, a child’s voice, a child’s gaze of wonder.
chewingtheglass 