A New Year

'"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

John Keats
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Early last summer an acquaintance prophesied without a doubt that I would be bed ridden in six months. That was six months ago. Well, don't invite me to go disco dancing or to run a marathon, but I stand, I walk, I climb three flights of stairs every day and I carry my own grocery bags. I'm not bragging. I'm just notifying.
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Any sure seeker of Truth must carry a two edged sword with which to decapitate all the evils that would prevent finding Truth. Why must we approach the darkness as warriors? Why must we prove ourselves worthy of the light? Why were we born just human in this box of ignorance from which we have to claw, punch and kick our way out? That is the Gordian Knot, the existential maze I still find myself in after 7 decades of planetary life.

I have a lot of books sitting around, I haven't counted them but there are a lot. They all have paper clips marking pages because they have all been opened and partially read. There are amazing beings tucked in the pages of a book. But something tells me that all the wisdom, all the literature one needs in order to know Truth can be found on a single page. But who can find that page? And having found it, who can read it? And having read it, who can understand it? And having understood it, who can explain it?

Is Keats right? Some think so, others don't. Perhaps it's not a great idea to settle for a simple statement, "Truth is beauty, beauty truth" with out analyzing what is meant by those titles. But that brings one back to seeking the meaning of Truth and hence Truth itself.

It has been said that darkness is the absence of light, Is, therefore, ignorance the absence of wisdom?

There is something very perplexing to me about this idea. I observed the recent
eclipse of the moon. While the light of the moon seemed to come and go, it was merely shadow. Darkness is therefore just shadow. The stronger the light the greater the shadow. Light comes and goes but not darkness. Take away the light and the darkeners remains. Does that mean darkness is the natural state, only temporarily erased by the coming of light. The sun's rays temporarily blocked by the earth cast a shadow on the face of the moon. But the moon has no light of its own, it is only reflected light. So the earth was only blocking off from the surface of the moon the sun's own reflected light. If there was no light of the sun, the moon would be dark all the time.

The theory is that light dispels darkness, but darkness does not dispel light.
Nature knows nothing of Thanksgiving, Hanukah, Christmas, New Year's Day or any of the other celebrations of us just humans. Nature knows nothing of our calendars. It has no relationship to the number 2011. All that nature was involved in were the equinox and the eclipse of the moon. But the eclipse signified that the suns reflected light from the moon was eclipsed by the shadow of the earth. Is that a case in which light was dispelled by darkness?

When you see a newborn baby screw up it's face into a terrible grimace and cry in desperate rage, is it because it has been taken out of the soft darkness of the womb into the blinding light of so called reality? And does it then need to claw, punch and kick it's way into acceptance?

Is it true that darkness is the natural state of the universe? And if so, is ignorance the natural state of us just humans?

DB - The Vagabond
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HAPPY NEW YEAR