“Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”
– Max Planck
“… the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.”
– Niels Bohr
Samsara and nirvana are One.
– Nagarjuna
WE ARE ALL OBSERVERS: Watchers. On-looking participants in the spectacle we call “the world”. In the arena of life’s day to day affair, we pay the world our casual regard – its ubiquitous presence is taken to be a given; habituated as we are to its comings and its goings – our world (in its manifest appearance) is a thing that most of us (most of the time) take for granted… And perhaps this is a part of our nature; that “part” of the way of things which somehow characterizes the way things are.
Breaking The (Classical) Mold
But while complacent we may be (as watchers and lookers-on) – as a “witness” to an omnipresent spectacle, we humans are also creatures of imagination… So riddle this: Within a myriad of images with all its correlated phenomena, looking outward at our world through our window of the eyes – do we simply find what we “appear” to see? Or is it (more) that we see – what we expect to find ..?
Which way does it seem to you?
WHO can say – and the question is more than just rhetorical. When it comes right down to the “chicken or the egg” of it – perhaps it’s because we imagine there to be no “apparent” context in which the two “views” can be teased apart – that when it’s down to what is seen – there would be little to distinguish the one proposition from the other. Like an artful sleight of hand (as if “seamless” or invisible) or the rhyme of a well-timed word bound-up in the rhythm of a tortuous riddle (as if someway we’re “entranced”) – the reflexive question challenges our assumptions by comparing the “vantage” provided by one’s view point to “the situation” of one’s point of view – as if to ask whether (in the end) the two views could ever be “disentangled”.
So much for objectivity… Like being in a kind of Mexican standoff with our “selves”, this curious circumstance of our own perceptual quandary appears to be somehow wired-in to our experience – and therefore seemingly unavoidable… But just like Schrödinger’s elusive cat – however unsettling this may be for us – it is only but the gist of an inexorable dilemma with profound implications for “our human situation”.
Side-stepping for the moment any of its quantum implications (or “uncertainty”), if we take our rhetorical exercise another step further it can all come down to the sim-ple, larger, and more intimately related question of whether an “objective” material world can exist “out there” – independent of ourselves; before we are in the picture to see it. A curious question indeed, but one that few of us ask given all its practical-ities… But regardless of what we may think of it, or however absurd it might appear, and despite all our time spent searching for definitive answers – we will still remain befuddled… Why? Because if we cast as wide a net as possible to ask that broadest of questions: Can the existence of the world be disentangled from the presence of our on-looking selves? – inevitably we will find and must eventually admit – that we cannot escape the “semantics” of our own predicament. Namely – that the existence of a questioner is pre-supposed by “the question” – and that “a who” is out of neces-sity – caught – within the rhetorical frame.
It is as if the querent (our “who” that is in question) – the hypostatized person that’s implied by our subject’s object (or conversely speaking by our object’s subject) – our hypothetical “self” (so to speak) – were somehow at the fulcrum of a peculiar sort of crossroad or rhetorical chiasm; suspended & juxtaposed, or someway superposed at a point midway between mirrored or opposing views (to have someway become “lo-calized”). Looked at systemically or taken as a whole – like an unusual series of twists and turns in an odd sort of maze – in the end – one can not definitively say if it is the world or the mind that perceives it which comes first.*
It’s like the ordinary palindrome, or simply not seeing the forest for the tree… In the arena of life’s day to day affair – “the question of our consciousness” – would appear to be wedded to a habit for complacency.
Continue on to Chapter 2: THE SHOW THAT NEVER ENDS
The Kerykeion
the telos of history 