On Sanity.

On Sanity.

 

What had been Sane yesterday given our frame of reference may very well be insane today. If we do not shed our cocoon, we risk death. Sanity cannot be held onto as a constant. It must be embraced as a part of the fluidity. We cannot use the same method to cope with a different phenomenon, and our experience is constantly new. A method will serve us until it is futile. Then we must take care to kill it before it usurps a throne.

 

Sanity is a deeply personal religious matter. Every cycle of discovery confronts us with the challenge of shedding the Old Ways. We ultimately fight our former ally alone. With more cycles, we may find an increasing regret for the realization that any ally we make, in the sense of a personal ego, we must ultimately slay, for it will turn against us. It will fight against us with all the ardour with which it fought for us until we take back its power. This may become easier with age, or it may become more difficult. Yet my faith is in that it will become easier, and that the people I’ve known who are less impressive gladiators than I have merely been slower to learn, or otherwise they have suffered more woundings. The greatest challenge is that we can never know HOW we defeat our foes. There doesn’t seem to be any Guarantee that we will. Yet the Uncertainty of the World would suggest that we do not need such a possibly impossible Guarantee in order to have faith. Oftentimes, it is our very absence of confidence that makes the battle more arduous for us. The Impermanence of things and therefore thoughts seems to be our saving Grace. We cannot ultimately hold on to ourselves; the illusion that we can may be our neurosis. Yet it is a pardonable illusion, for man does not live in absolutes, and to be totally without illusion is impossible. The Beast will ultimately die and the fabric will tear. Yet we can never know how we did it or how it happened, and that is the Unresolvable and therefore Sacred nature of our Mystery of Being.

 

For this reason, to make the absolute claim that there is no such thing as Free Will seems also to invest too much confidence in our knowledge of things. There may be. There may not be. Yet it is not our task to know. Scientism has obscured this basic sanity and perverted the quest for inner peace by turning into a dogma based upon the absurd notion that Certainty can be attained. Yet Scientism is merely the latest form of dogma which has plagued us for as long as we can recall. Maybe I ought not to combat it with the hopes of utterly destroying it. Yet I would be equally deluded not to combat it.

 

Dm.A.A.