You can either write about the sound of one hand clapping
OR
Joshu asked Nansen: `What is the path?'
Nansen said: `Everyday life is the path.'
Joshu asked: `Can it be studied?'
Nansen said: `If you try to study, you will be far away from it.'
Joshu asked: `If I do not study, how can I know it is the path?'
Nansen said: `The path does not belong to the perception world, neither does it belong to the nonperception world. Cognition is a delusion and noncognition is senseless. If you want to reach the true path beyond doubt, place yourself in the same freedom as sky. You name it neither good nor not-good.'
Decipher and Discuss--good luck.
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Joshu asked: 'Can it be studied?'
Nansen said: 'If you try to study, you will be far away from it.'
I think this issue is the biggest thing I struggle with in our World Lit class. I feel at times that we are trying to study and philosophize about life and ourselves so much that we become lost in the labyrinth of self-analysis. Ultimately, I fail to see the point... I mean, no matter how may epiphanies or crack-ups we discover in the classroom, by focusing so much on ourselves we fail to recognize all of those around us, both in our visible worlds and halfway across the globe.
In our class on Monday, we said that you can only begin to help others when you thoroughly know yourself. But how is this possible? One could spend their entire life devoted to self-analysis, I believe, and still posses many doubts and questions about human nature. At that point, it is too late to help others. If we, the privileged elite of the developed world, waste our entire lives focusing inward, who will focus outward? Who will help those who need it most, who are too busy trying to survive on a day-to-day basis to pause for reflection?
I am fully aware of the importance of our third worlds; the ability to synthesize and create is what separates homo sapiens from other animals. Yet I think that we cannot focus on the abstractions of our third worlds at the expense of avoiding the realities of the true third world: places like Sudan, Palestine, Laos, Chechnya, Lebanon, Haiti, Pakistan, Bolivia, and so many more. Being cognizant of our imaginations does little to eradicate their very real daily crises.
I understand that much of high school is about establishing awareness, both awareness of yourself and the world. But there comes a point when I get sick and tired of talking about all the problems in the world. Talking is not action; it is a pathetic excuse for inaction.
Yet most of my frustration in this matter is a manifestation of personal guilt. I try to do things to give back to my local and global community: recycling, volunteering, Outreach, etc. But there is much more failure than true success in these endeavors: I (along with some other seniors) have been trying to establish and Amnesty International chapter at Berwick, but the efforts have been anemic at best. The recycling program has been doing (somewhat) better as of late, but it was struggling for awhile. I realize that the blame doesn't entirely rest with me, but I carry probably the biggest portion of it because I have failed to organize and properly motivate people. Overall, I've run into major issues both with recycling and Amnesty because my time (the kronos version) has been wrapped up with other commitments.
I think this is what angers me about myself the most: I'm so selfishly focused on trying to be a good student, actor, dancer, singer, what have you, that I'm ignoring the rest of the world. I should be dedicating all my time to things like Amnesty, instead of worrying about AP Calc or Anatomy & Physiology. I've tried to stop caring about insignificant things like grades, but I'm too weak; I'm a slave of the system of school. And I feel like if I'm not devoting all my energy to every subject I take, than I am failing myself or my teachers. I could blame the BA environment, or the fact that in my family school is pretty important. But I know that, at the end of the day, the only place the fault truly lays is within me.
But back to the topic...
Cognition is a delusion and noncognition is senseless. If you want to reach the true path beyond doubt, place yourself in the same freedom as sky. You name it neither good nor not-good.'
Ultimately, life is all about balancing the dualities of our existence - between life and death, black and white, reality and fantasy, epiphanies and crack-ups, order and chaos, success and failure. Fitzgerald writes, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." As this rambling and somewhat contradictory post proves, I am still very much struggling with this. I suppose the thesis of the entry, if there had to be one, is that in myself, in World Lit class, and in Berwick in general, we have not yet found the proper balance between analysis and action. Understanding the problems we face in the world is crucial, but useless unless we utilize that knowledge for making active steps towards positive change.
Meg- You’re a saint, but very much unaware of your sainthood.
It’s somewhat ironic to devote your whole life to studying life, for in this process you give it up. You give up what you’re trying to figure out, and then there becomes no point to figuring it out. “If you try to study, you will be far away from it.” The Underground Man is an example of this type of person, who spends his entire life attempting to gain a full cognition of life, but misses out on life in the process. Since living is the path, he never reaches the path; he gets bogged down by his own thoughts on the world, which prevents him from being a part of the world entirely.
On the other end of the spectrum, if you absentmindedly go through the motions of living, without putting any thoughts behind your actions, then you’re not really living. You’re just blindly traveling down the path, without being even aware of its presence: “If you do not study it, then how do you know it’s the path.”
In the end of The Underground Man, Dostoyevsky poses the question, “What’s better, cheap happiness or lofty suffering?” The Underground Man lived a life of lofty suffering, but living in cheap happiness isn’t that much better. Cheap happiness, I took to mean just blinding yourself to the things you don’t like in the world, so all you see are the ones that make you happy; cheap happiness is noncognition. Most people do this to some degree. This is the reason why every time I hear of some horrible trauma on the news, I turn myself off to it; I don’t want to shred my-made cloud of disillusionment which protects from anything harmful out there.
So as Meg said, the only thing to do is find a balance, a balance between cheap happiness and lofty suffering, between cognition and noncognition. This is the only way to reach the third world. Because living in only world 2, your minds, distances you from life (no experiences). But living only in world 1, makes it so your life is superficial (no mind). The only solution is live partially in both, to always dwell in this third world, and erase the wall between thoughts and actions so they flow seamlessly together. This will give you the “same freedom as the sky,” because now you are not trapped within either your mind or only the first world, but living freely in both; your paths are limitless.
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