The Big Swim

Not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, does the enlightened man dislike to wade into its waters.

Friedrich Nietzsche
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Hello Jen
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That statement could just as easily come from Lao Tze as from Nietzsche. They were both enlightened and comparable thinkers. Both were accustomed to tread into the murky, trash filled waters of pseudo science and false morality. Both could be found cleaning up the deep swamps of superstition. And they would enjoy swimming in the oceans of creativity, imagination and inspired thought.

I read both of those philosophers as well as others who have avoided the ankle deep mud puddles of tinsel intellect and waded into the deep. The most exciting part of any study that takes one into serious water is that the inspiration for ardent, progressive thought comes from the unmet and unknown community of thinkers. It is why the enlightened ones need to write and be published. Even though any language is limited in its ability to translate supreme ideas into words and symbols, the attempt to do so and the accompanying challenges from other thinkers to those ideas is what creates the commerce of ocean dwelling men and women and the sharing and gradual focusing of immortal light on the truth.

To me, in my advancement into the senior class, there is hardly any human activity more interesting than the market place of ideas as it is found in philosophy, art and science. To identify a controlling principle through understanding its expressions and to trace individual experiences, mental and spiritual, back up to a dominant principle is an ever exciting journey.

The world of pond and brook dwellers tend to think of advanced intellectuals as ivory tower types who live in a world of isolation from other thinkers. But that's a false impression. I have often said that as an actor when I see a play or a film I am watching other actors working. I know a difficult scene when I see one and I can admire how a good actor engineers his way through it. The same can be said for musicians listening to other musicians playing or artists at an exhibit of paintings. There are some fundamental ethical, psychological and metaphysical questions that all philosophers must approach at some point in their work and how they engineer their way through the questions to a proposed answer is fuel and food for another thinker. And thus the big swim continues.

DB - Vagabond Journeys
Never Give Up
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