More Articles

Any question, however trivial, presupposes a regard for the truth. The questioner may be satisfied with a lie or a mistruth - indeed may ultimately insist upon it - but the initial assumption from which every single inquiry springs is that the truth is actually desired. Experience also seems to teach us that the resolution of certain conflicts is brought about more easily, more quickly and less painfully once all the facts of a matter are laid out. There are three distinct human levels of inquiry into the truth of a matter: the particular (the facts about this instance), the general (the facts about most instances) and the absolute (the facts about all instances). Most of everyday life is spent within the realm of the particular and is circumscribed by a fairly obvious set of limitations. When there is conflict, then the particular can play a very limited role; while in times of crisis or deeper reflection, the general truths are brought into play. The general inquiry, however, is often at the mercy of the particular - which has the weight of accumulated memory on its side and hence the easy influence of an emotional response. If great care and attention is given to the matter, however, the deeper inquiry into the general can yield a glimpse of something even far deeper and far beyond both the particular - the here and now of the immediate problem - and the general - the way in which this problem is common to all humanity. That ‘something’ is the absolute. The absolute cannot be approached by either thought or language because the absolute contains everything, and so no one fragment within that everything can be held to be an authority upon the whole. The absolute contains thought and language; thought and language cannot contain the absolute. The most that any serious, careful, attentive inquiry into the truth of any matter can attain is an awareness that thought and language are both limited. This awareness can be reached by several routes. We see that the absolute - which one could also call the universal - cannot be approached by either thought or language. The absolute cannot be informed by either the particular or the general. The whole cannot be understood by the fragment, by the particle, nor even by the collection of fragments governed by a general principle. What then is the relationship of the absolute to the rest of life? Can the absolute have any bearing upon human existence?

Although we started out by saying that any question, however trivial, presupposes a regard for the truth, in reality a question only presupposes the desire for an answer. Humankind seems to have scant regard for the truth - for the actual careful observation of a question or a problem - and tends to rush headlong towards the nearest comfortable resolution. The speed with which even the most profound and difficult human questions are answered - economic, political, psychological - is sufficient evidence for this kind of statement, let alone the haste so commonly seen and heard in everyday human social intercourse. After centuries of thought and argument the most profound human questions have never been answered. So the desire for an answer is part of a much wider picture and in order to see that picture we need to look not at the various answers that history has thrown up over countless millennia but at the nature of the desire itself, which is the driving force of all human activity. The desire for truth and the desire for deceit are just two sides of the same coin. So the desire for peace is not too far removed from the actuality of war; the desire for pleasure sometimes mirrors the desire for pain; the desire for reality often ends in the desire for illusion; the desire for heaven can create a certain kind of hell; the desire to create can overlap with the desire to destroy. In other words, each set of opposites is intrinsically interwoven and interrelated. One cannot exist without the other; each needs and feeds upon the other; both are cause and effect. Desire can only operate within a framework of time. Desire has relevance and meaning only in the interval between two points in time: the present sense of loss or absence, and the future sense of imagined recovery or salvation. Without that overall sense of movement - of becoming - desire has no existence. Simply put, then, desire can never be a means of approaching absolute reality. For absolute reality must by definition be accessible immediately, in the here and now, without movement in either time or space.

What are the implications of this fact in relation to our course of inquiry? What role does desire play in our very own search for the truth? Is our path of philosophy instigated by desire? Now, we know that the word Philosophy means the love of truth. That is its simple root meaning. It cannot mean the love of thought or the love of language or the love of logic, for the truth cannot be contained within the limitations of just thought, language or logic. Truth can be neither limited by logic nor defined by language. These things are tools only. They may be useful for some things; and they may prove useless for other things. Nor can Philosophy mean the desire for truth, which is an equally important distinction, for that places the truth somewhere in the future and thus presupposes a route to it. It also presupposes that truth is in itself desirable, which may seem to make sense but which is in actual fact a dangerous belief. Anything that can be desired can also be ignored and shunned, neglected and forgotten, once that desire has ceased. In other words, whatever is deemed desirable can also be deemed undesirable. We may have a desire for the truth on Monday only to have cold indifference towards it on Tuesday. So love of the truth is different from desire for truth. Desire works in the field of time. But truth is both beyond and before time; truth both contains time and is outside of it. Desire is after all nothing more than an impulse to move away from the present moment to an imagined point in the future. Such impulses come from any number of sources - from boredom, from guilt, from loneliness, et cetera - all of which are themselves fed by something deeper. When we are truly alive in the present moment, there is no running away from it because there is no fear of it and no confusion about it. It is only when we are feeling afraid or confused that we seek to move somewhere else - perhaps physically to another place, or emotionally to another memory, or intellectually to another mental activity, or to an attempt at inactivity. Then the whole circus of desire is started up.

So is all of this script too based on desire? Or does it spring from another source? Obviously, there is desire if there is a search - that much is self-evident. A search for something naturally assumes that there is something we want or desire to find. So we must ask another question: Is Philosophy a search for a conclusion, for an ending, or it is more like a journey which is undertaken and enjoyed for its own sake? Does the love of the truth imply a quest to capture something? Or does it mean instead a state of being that watches, that sees the truth of things without any movement towards or away from them? True philosophy can only ever be a journey - a journey into the moment, into the present, into the now, into the exploration and investigation of ‘what is’ - whereas to look back at one’s point of departure or forward to one’s imagined destination is to look away from the here and now, to lose sight of what is right beneath one’s nose, and to miss the wood for the trees. So this has to be a journey into the now, not a journey into either the past or the future. What place, then, has desire in such a journey?

To take a journey into the ‘now’ is probably one of the most difficult things to do, requiring enormous patience, diligence and care both emotionally and intellectually. Why? Because desire cannot tread there - in the present - at all. So we cannot talk of the desire to examine the ‘now’ without making nonsense of the language we are employing. We examine the now or we don’t; either we look at what is or we don’t - but to say, “I want to look at what is” is patently absurd. The very act of ‘wanting’ means that the looking is delayed, put in abeyance both emotionally and intellectually. Yet, if we are totally honest with ourselves, the only reason we have visited a web-site such as this (if we are serious about it and not just out to cause trouble) is in order to try and gain some better understanding of what it means to live in the present, to undertake that special journey. We want to see ‘what is’; we want to examine ourselves; we want to be free of all the travail of desire. And if we have gone into this a lot and at considerable depth, we want to find out whether or not the action of thought itself can come to an end and thus realise what is called the transformation of consciousness. If we are honest, that is what we want. At the very least, we expect and hope for some sort of reward for our patience and effort.

Now, if desire cannot tread into the arena of the now, neither can thought itself - for the two are inseparable. In fact, thought might simply be defined as movement, which is the fundamental action of desire: the movement towards the perceived goal. This is not a new discovery: we are clearly going over old ground here. We know that thought is limited; we accept that, or, at least, we seem to have no choice in the matter. Time and again, therefore, we hit this brick wall beyond which thought cannot go. Endlessly, it seems, we are able to discuss the concept of ‘what is’ without ever really feeling that we have touched the bare reality behind those words. Thoughts about all sorts of issues have been raised; a careful and sensitive path has been trodden; and yet at the end the thoughts fail the thinker and leave one in a very strange kind of limbo. There is no perceivable way forward; and there is no desperate wish to go back along old paths and promises. So what happens? What really happens?

This is the scenario with which you may be familiar: thought has exhausted itself; it has been searching for an answer and has not found anything new; and only the new will suffice; the old, the known, is of no use. But because thought is constituted of the known and the old, to find the new means to go beyond all that. Thought cannot go there. So thought must stop trying and allow the mind to find its own way into that place where thought cannot tread. Can thought do that? Can it stop? Can it see that it is creating all its own friction and conflict? Can it see that the smallest movement of thought, even the very tiniest movement of desire to end its difficulty and solve its problem, is really the only thing that is perpetuating the difficulty and the problem? Can thought have the insight into all this? Can thought see that without the question, there is suddenly no desire for an answer?

We cannot stop asking questions, having motives, seeking escapes. That is a fact. It is quite obvious. We hit the brick wall and we say, ‘What happens now?’ or ‘Why am I not enlightened?’ or ‘I have got this far, why has nothing else happened?’ This is a very simple fact, and we overlook it, time and time again: we cannot stop asking questions. So we ask more questions. We accept the fact. Or - just as bad - we reject the fact, and try to force the mind to be silent and still. Once thought has arrived at the limits of its realm, reached the brick wall and tried unsuccessfully to go over, under and through it, thought has but three options: to attempt to breach the wall in another way; to stop trying; or to stop trying and go back into its own familiar territory. Between the first and third option, is squeezed that seemingly impossible possibility that means no dependence upon authority, no reliance on second-hand knowledge, no intermediary, no thing and no one between me and what is. Yet a careful and honest awareness of what actually happens within oneself is to see that one does tend to choose either that first or that third option. Even raising the concept of the second option - stop trying - changes it into one of the others because of the blessed question: How do I stop trying? Thought cannot stop asking these questions, having motives and seeking escapes from the present moment. That is a solid incontrovertible, irrefutable fact. So is there an answer for which there is no question? Is there a movement that has no self-interested motive? And is there an escape from the futility of all escape? Which one might say is the only necessary escape because it is the only escape that a serious and sane mind would contemplate.

Our whole intellectual journey in these matters of consciousness and the deeper meanings of human life often starts with a particular personal experience; from there we might delve into more general issues surrounding the subject, weighing the opinions of others, undertaking a certain amount of research and recapitulation; and finally such a time comes when we start to play around with the more abstract concepts of the absolute. Now, the statement that ‘thought cannot stop asking questions’ is a statement of absolute truth. The simple problem is that although we readily respond to it either as a particular truth - ‘I cannot stop asking questions’ - or as a general truth - ‘we cannot stop asking questions’ - we do not respond to it as an absolute truth, for that demands an absolute response, not a personal or a general one. It is in the nature of personal response to either accept or reject a statement, a proposition, an event, a situation: the action of acceptance or rejection being the essence of the personal, of the ‘me’ and ‘you’, of the person who is accepting or rejecting and the thing which is being accepted or rejected, of the separate observer and observed. The general kind of response is really what I am doing now and what I have been doing from the start of this: I am picking over the bones of the problem and trying to look at it in another way. We are able to go quite far together in the general response to life, especially if we share roughly the same history or set of experiences, those similar sorts of personal responses. But both the personal and the general response is limited and flawed: both ultimately give importance to the one who is ‘looking’, to the ‘investigator’, to the ‘researcher’, to the ‘me’; and both are hemmed in by the constraints and controls of the tools being used.

‘Thought cannot stop asking questions.’ The personal response to such a statement is often one of frustration, resignation; while the general response is quite vast and varied, having at its disposal every nuance and trick of the language, every subtlety of intellect. Do we perhaps see by now what the absolute response is? It is the response to an absolute fact, to something immutable. So there is no personal response, no action of self-interest or self-glorification or self-identification or self-deprecation. Nor is there the general response of analytical thought, of sophisticated argument. There is a simple absolute response to a simple absolute fact: which must mean that there is no response at all, no reaction in any terms that we understand. For the fact and the response are both in the same field, both of the same cloth. There is no ‘fact, then an interval, then response’ for there is no space, and no time, between the two.

To meet a statement, any verbal or written statement, with a response, is always going to be a limited response because the statement is always going to be weighed, measured and evaluated in the course of the meeting. The truth of the statement that ‘thought cannot stop asking questions’ or ‘thought must always have a motive’ or ‘thought is always seeking escape’ is not actually in the statement at all for the truth can be neither contained nor transmitted through language, however intricate and precise. So to approach the statement, any statement, hoping to discover the truth or the fact of it, is to move away from the truth, away from the fact, and back into the personal self-enclosed world. Likewise, therefore, the brick wall of the enquiry: the only possible intelligent response is to stop trying and to stay where one is.

We said that any serious enquiry needs to be undertaken out of love for the truth and not for love of words, or love of language, or love of logic, or love of knowledge, or love of thought. The truth stands outside all of that; those things may point at the truth of something, or describe the truth of something, or declare the truth of something; but the truth is not something that can be captured and controlled; and all those things are about capture and control, about precision and definition. That word ‘definition’ is itself quite an interesting one for it has two distinct yet overlapping meanings: first, something can be clearly defined as to its meaning; and, second, something can be clearly defined as an image or an outline which stands out against or contrasts with its background. So when we seek to define what is the truth about a particular matter these two distinctions need to be both kept in mind. For the thing being defined, whatever it may be, only has its definition in relation to the whole background against which it is being viewed. In other words, in seeking to reach some understanding of the truth we need to remember that it is only ever really an image that is being defined: and that image is being projected by the same entity who is attempting to define it. The image of truth may apparently stand out clearly from its background; but the background is also part of the definition; as is the very act of defining. The one defining is the thing defined: and therefore, to define truth, is only to define oneself. It is a self-generated, circular activity. The truth cannot be defined. It cannot be put into words. It cannot be expressed as an equation or as a model or as a theorem or formula. Words may adequately describe what is true, but the description is never the described: my description of the room in which I am now sitting is not and never can be a truthful conveyance to you of the actual room itself. The best you will get is first my interpretation, and then your interpretation of my interpretation: a pale and distorted shadow indeed. A description of the concert I attended last evening, is not the same as the music I heard.

If we both clearly see this difficulty in comprehension and communication, it has a tremendous effect on the whole demeanour of our subsequent enquiries. We are faced with no less a task than finding a completely different kind of approach to the arena of those problems, questions and concerns into which we may previously have hastened with confidence. Alternatively, if we are in love merely with words, with the power of language, with the ramifications of thought, we might ignore these difficulties anyway, as most people do. The clever use of words, the right stylistic and literary effects, the sophistry and elegance of reasoned argument: these will take us a long way in this world, and will provide much to keep us warm, safe and happy. Why then should we trouble ourselves to discover and delve into this rather unsettling fact that language, thought and logic bear little or no relation to what is true? If the illusion is so pleasurable, why dismantle and destroy it? Why battle against a tide of tradition and accepted belief? Besides, at the end of such an endeavour, it may all be for nothing.

What a hold such thoughts have on us. What an incredible grip for so few words and phrases. Yet our whole life may turn on one or two of them alone. That too is part of the truth, the truth which can be described at length but which cannot be grasped as though it were a solid piece of furniture, as solid as this table. For what can a mind that is itself gripped by words and beliefs grasp hold of? Grasp - not in the sense of cling to in desperation as to a life-raft, but more in the sense of a grasp in understanding, in comprehension, and then a letting go. To grasp the truth that words, preconceptions, beliefs are the only bricks which make up the prison wall of human existence is to see that wall dissolve, disperse, disappear. (There, we have put it as simply as that. It is as short and succinct as that. There is no thunder-bolt, no psychic lightening storm, no great mystery involved: the only mystery is why it is not transparently obvious to each and every one of us. Except that it is transparently obvious - it is so transparent we look right through it and miss it altogether. For if you wish to conceal something really well, the best place to hide it is in such full view that it is never spotted because everyone is out looking in all the hidden corners.)

We ought to introduce the word ‘enlightenment’ at this point as it has taken on a life so far removed from its actual significance that it is barely recognisable. Today, it is more like a holy grail, a symbolic relic, an almost sacred state of being. Well, perhaps enlightenment is a sacred state of being: the only trouble is, that word ‘sacred’ is not what it was either. The word 'sacred' has come down to us with so many connotations and associations that it is almost impossible to get any true grasp of its meaning or significance. But aside from the special religious and spiritual power of the word - and hence the power of the concept of sacredness, of sacred places and people - one hesitates to suggest a much simpler interpretation of this word. The operation of thought - as time, movement, feeling, hope, fear, anticipation, expectation, etc. - is always an operation of insecurity. Thought is working in an insecure or unstable matrix because it is only an invention, a reflection of reality. The mind in which thought is working is consequently suffused with that same sense of insecurity, of the randomness of events, the instability of relationships. Yet the mind craves security; the human individual wishes to be secure: secure in possessions, in physical necessities, comforts, and so on. From that wish for security, thought sets off an impossible quest: a way of discovering some special security which is beyond destruction, beyond annihilation: the personal security of wealth or love; the social security of reform and revolution; or the spiritual security of coming upon the sacred heart of existence. In searching for the sacred, we search for security. Put like that, the word seems a little less esoteric and mysterious.

Because the human mind is always trying to make sense of the world and of its own role in that environment, it produces some most unexpected and ludicrous experiences for itself. It can convince itself of almost anything, and then spend the next few years trying to overturn that conviction or replace it with another, little realising that the whole pattern it has been attempting to follow is self-drawn and self-defined. The ways of self-deception are thus infinite and one of the most deceptive and destructive of all the paths of the self is this search for something sacred, secure, beyond measure and time. Like any search of the mind or spirit, it always begins at the wrong end - at the perceived goal - and automatically and tragically ignores the solid ground of truth upon which it is already treading.

The search for security has nothing at all to do with security: the search is all about insecurity, about the disappointment, fear and subsequent continual movement away from that. The mind has invented the concept of security and sets out to find the reality that will match that concept. But the key is not in the concept, the key is in the starting point; the key to understanding all about this is in the experience and state of human insecurity. The enormous amount of effort that goes into living with the state of insecurity while constantly ignoring it is quite staggering. But if we watch others, and ourselves, we should see that this is so. The state of insecurity is the direct instigator of human attachment: attachments to other people; to belief systems; to wealth, fame, and power; to intellectual and sporting prowess; to ideals of social responsibility and charity; to books, possessions, and places. All that attachment requires tremendous psychic energy: to protect, to defend, to anticipate, to guarantee, to insure, and so on. Energy that we are apparently happy to expend and renew over and over again, without ever really finding out why we are doing it.

Attachment is all about relationship - the relationship between the subject and the object of attachment. I am attached to you. I am attached to my reputation. I am attached to my bank account. I am attached to my country. Each instance of attachment has these two elements, the one who is attached and the one to whom the attachment is made. More than this, however, is the more complex relationship that is contained and often obscured from view within this simple picture. In the case whereby I am attached to you, for example, you are important to me only because I have bestowed that importance upon you. In other words, the attachment I have formed with you - whether it is an emotional, intellectual, sexual attachment - is really nothing much to do with yourself but is more about the significance I have attached to you. Likewise, the attachment to my reputation or my job, which probably extends far beyond the necessity of securing the income to maintain a simple existence. So there is another deeper relationship at work, far more compelling and intrinsic than this simple description of the subject and the object. Or, rather, there is really a subject and an object different from those initially identified.

‘I am attached to my job.’ Let’s use that example and explore it a little. I am attached to my job because it gives me a secure wage and keeps me in food and shelter. That is one level. In some parts of the world for some people that is the only level: to stay in employment is to stay alive, to stay fed and clothed. But if I live in a prosperous and socially expanding and vibrant part of the world, the job I undertake fulfils more of a function. It provides me with a means of filling my time engaged in what I deem to be an activity which is valuable for many other reasons. It provides a certain amount of luxury and indulgence. It provides opportunities to travel and discover wider pleasures. It bolsters my self-esteem because it gives me a certain province wherein I am rewarded for my contributions, not just financially, but socially, verbally, emotionally and psychologically. It provides new experiences and challenges. And so for most of us living in the industrialised nations on earth, the jobs we do on a daily basis have enormous importance and position in our lives well beyond the fact that they help to put bread on the table. All of that, therefore, is within the statement ‘I am attached to my job.’

It is clear, then, that in attachment there is a strong psychological factor: a sense of fulfilment or potential fulfilment, of self-identity, of significance. For while most people will not bother to explore the fuller implications of the meaning of their life (assuming they have the time to do so), the reality is that everyone goes through a process of allocating meaning to their life and becoming attached to the object wherein that meaning is most clearly visible. This process is not a conscious process, it is not a time-consuming process, it is not even always a pleasant process, but because the individual is aware of the prospect of a whole future before them, such a process occurs. Attachment, then, is really about attachment to significance, to meaning. ‘I am attached to my job. I am attached to the status of my job, the kudos of my job, the position which my job provides. I am attached to the significance of my job.’ Yet also it is clear that I myself have bestowed that significance. I am attached to the significance which I have created and bestowed. In effect, I am attached to myself - or, more accurately, to that image of myself which I have projected on to a certain part of the world. And here we get to the core of the attachment, the essential relationship at the heart of all this: the relationship between myself and the projected image of myself.

All we are doing in the course of this investigation is casting some light on to all of this in order to see it for what it is. We are not leading anywhere, to any conclusion, to any formula or plan; nor are we saying that this should or should not happen; and we are not trying to create anything at all; rather we are interested only in what is already amongst us and within us. So we are open to any criticism whatsoever, to any challenge of common-sense or honesty, to anything that may bring further clarity. There are no conclusions whatsoever to draw about this matter. There is no final answer for what is being described and delineated here. Also, throughout the whole of this script there is at work for both the reader and the writer another factor which is constant and invisible. We said that the activity of thought produces an image of the self; the self becomes attached to that image; that attachment then needs protecting and sustaining, which inevitably breeds a degree of insecurity; that insecurity sets the mind off on a search to discover the security of the truth. So we need to remember that the activity of thought - which is the activity of desire - is always at work. Now, you may think that you are reading these words objectively and logically. Actually, you are not reading the words at all, you are reading yourself. The mere fact that you wish to read what is written and have continued reading up until this point is clear evidence that you are attached in some manner to what is being said. You are agreeing with some parts, disagreeing with other parts, puzzled by some sentences, ignoring the odd phrase or two, making jumps where you think you understand what it is getting at, re-reading occasional lines, and making many tiny judgements and alterations as you proceed through these pages. There is no problem with any of that. The same will apply to anything you may read or look at or think about. For the self that examines the world, is the same self that is being examined - and this present script is part of that examination, part of that wider search.

We could have begun all of this by simply stating something to the effect that: the self which examines is also the examined (in other words, that the observer is also the observed). You would have recognised the statement and perhaps still carried on reading. But the point is that such statements have very little impact on us, on our intellects, on the continuing activity of our thoughts. It is only by careful sustained enquiry that we can really come upon the truth of such statements, for they are totally beyond the ken of the evaluating intellect. The evaluating is part of the problem that that same intellect is trying to solve. The evaluating intellect is searching for the truth only because it is in a state of uncertainty and insecurity. The evaluating intellect is only insecure because it has formed a number or a series of attachments to concepts and ideas that it must then protect and justify. The evaluating intellect has formed these attachments because without them it would have no sense of meaning or order. Without them, it would have no sense of self.

I have created my own sense of self from the efforts of my own intellect. I have picked out certain things that reflect their image back at me and thus provide some sort of centre from which I can then continue to operate. Without that centre, without that sense of self-identity, I have a sense only of a void, an empty vacuum, into which I can see only the prospect of annihilation. All this, as we said previously, has happened unconsciously, slowly, little by little strengthening the sense of self as the years have gone by until a separate and distinct reality appears to be there, with all its mannerisms, habits, pre-occupations and traditions. But that sense of self is self-created, self-generated, self-sustaining, and self-perpetuating. It is trapped within itself. It is defined, which means it is limited, distinct, partial; but more importantly it is defined only by itself - although the impression is that the outside world is doing the defining, the world is encouraging, praising, blaming, reinforcing the self. That is simply not so. The self is its own invention.

So when I lose my job, or my husband or my wife or my valued possessions or my carefully manufactured reputation in the eyes of my peers, it is no wonder or surprise that I experience a degree of annihilation for I am indeed suffering a certain kind of death. I have lived for so long in the belief that the attachment to my job was with something real and separate that the disturbance in my relationship with it also feels real. I have lost something valuable and precious and have been forced to stare for a while into the empty void. Little do I realise, however, that the fear of that empty void is in direct correspondence to the strength of my attachments, to the strength of my sense of self. The more powerful the ego, the more fearsome the void. To put it another way, the mind that has created its own sense of self has also created the sense of the vacuum, the void. In fact, they are really the one and the same: for it is the separate self which is really living in a vacuum, cut off from reality and isolated from every other atom of life, despite each wish to the contrary to be part of the vast stream of existence.

To meet adequately and to make sense of the statement that ‘the self is its own invention’ demands enormous patience and sensitivity. I have created my own sense of self from the efforts of my own intellect. So my own intellect cannot make sense of the statement, cannot meet the statement at all. No personal response will ever bridge the gap between the statement and the truth of the statement, because the personal response is the gap. Only when the efforts of the personal intellect cease completely, can that gap close. Then there is no philosopher examining this issue, there is just the action of philosophy. Then there is no distorting element of desire; there is just the action of love. There is an absent philosopher yet a perennial absolute philosophy.

The writer has worked all this out for himself. In doing so, he has seen it in a way that no amount of reading or thinking over other people’s ideas and suggestions could ever approach. So the writer repeats that he has no conclusions to offer, no advice or guidance of his own. The writer may also be very misguided and mistaken. The writer can also anticipate the next question, even though it may remain unvoiced. “I have been all through this and followed each step carefully and I can see it all intellectually - but I am stuck at this point. What am I to do?”

In reply: Can you remain stuck and frustrated? Can you stay with the state of not knowing the answer? Can you endure the lack of clarity, the uncertainty? The answer is simple - Yes, you can. You already live with all those things on a daily basis, do you not? As human beings living in this world, in this society, we live with uncertainty, with frustration, with not knowing. That is why you have come this far already. You started from uncertainty and the whole of your enquiry has been an attempt to move away from it. So why is this state of uncertainty any different? Why continue to move away from it? Why move away from the insolubility of this puzzle? But probably you will move away: you will move away to the easiest or to the most comfortable answer. You will give up for a while and pursue some other interest, some other diversion. You will turn it in completely, perhaps, and give it all up as a bad job, a bad joke. Or you will translate everything into your own terms - by which I mean the terms of thought - and ask more questions, seek further second-hand clarification, push on into the barrier, in the belief that you are moving forward or, at least, on the brink of moving forward. The means of escape are all there and waiting.

But there remains the absolutely necessary escape, which is no escape whatsoever.

Submit your responses or comments regarding this article to journal@kinfonet.org.