Meditations

Time to reflect. ‘Metaphysics of presence’.

I am in the miasmas of doubts and uncertainties with irritable reaching after fact and reason.

In my hour of disquiet, my query of doubt gestate: what if everything I know isn’t so? Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise or so, they say. Is the yearning for wisdom a proper drive? I begin to doubt myself, one too many times. Even if this set of truth is an argument, and even if, this reality just is — these doubts, these ‘tensions, the contradictions, the heterogeneity within [the] corpus’ persist. I ought to introduce a secondary state: I can reframe my argument and re-experience my reality.

I recall a time, not long ago, I was at a Zen monastery in San Francisco where I was introduced to Rilke.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Relentlessly searching for knowledge is similar to any search: to seek is to be without. I fear that I, like many seekers, will see a growing paradox.