Surfacing

Day 3:

Here's what I'm learning to believe:

A Mayan proverb: If you do not ask, you will be lost.

As one begins to step across the limn of a different way to live, the dissolution of unskilled thinking is key. Keep asking for more focus as you fight through illusion and step onto dry land.

Ask penetrating, insightful questions.

Ask these questions precisely.

Demonstrate to yourself that your mind may finally function as more than just a noisy reflex organ.

It may now become simply elegant.

But make no mistake: the dissolution of the cringing mind, the end of an addiction to the disease of thinking MUST NOT EVER manifest itself in anti-intellectualism.

More than anything else, unmindful anti-intellectualism is responsible for the madness of our unending state of war.

But unskilled finger pointing is also unmindful. It is also banal. So I will stop doing so.

Instead, I would emphasize that the only thing that matters is that you or I must not fall into this trap on the way to waking up.

Anti-intellectualism is a form of spiritual death.

Kitsch, sentimentality, and tautology are not acceptable or appropriate tools for the seeker.

There is such energetic rigour and specificity required in the work of skilled living.

Where you find kitsch, you will not find enlightenment.

Why?

Because kitsch is incompatible with meaningful questions.

Anti-intellectualism is incompatible with meaningful questions.

I'll close this post with an excerpt taken from Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It may be very familiar to many of you, but it rewards another close reading:

"The fact that until recently the word 'shit' appeared
in print as s--- has nothing to do with moral
considerations. You can't claim shit is immoral, after
all! The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The
daily defecation session is daily proof of the
unacceptability of Creation. Either/or: either shit is
acceptable (in which case don't lock yourself in the
bathroom!) or we are created in an unacceptable
manner.

It follows, then, than the aesthetic ideal of the
categorical agreement with being is a world in which
shit is denied and everyone acts as if it did not
exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch.

'Kitsch' is a German word born in the middle of the
sentimental 19th century, and from German it entered
all Western languages. Repeated use, however, has
obliterated its original metaphysical meaning: kitsch
is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal
and figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes
everything from its purview which is essentially
unacceptable in human existence." (Kundera 248)