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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Empirical Emergency 6/27/09

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.

Emerson
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Howdy
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I wonder, with anxiety, what it is that has stupified the human race. It seems to me that very few things we humans do make any sense. We have wealthy Congressmen deciding on legislation to affect the poor, and if, by chance, it looks worthwhile, they vote against it. We have men who couldn't throw a football if their lives were at stake discussing the relative merits of one athlete over another. We have folks who would be frightened to death to step out on a bare stage in front of an audience critiquing those who do. We have those who are too old to go into battle sending others off to do it. We have men and women fighting in a foreign land under the ruse of defending ourselves and then coming home in boxes. We have children disappearing or being abused at home, We have pastors preaching honesty and family values who have mistresses on the side. We have medicines which are dangerous to our health. We have products that can cause accidents. We have economic theories that feed the greedy and starve the poor. We have banks that plunder people and courts that tie them down. And we are all out to get even with somebody.

What has brought us to this point of stupidity? Social structures, traditions, fear?

I don't know where to point the finger of blame except at myself. I learned a while back that it's no use complaining about a problem unless you are prepared to do something about it. I wonder what more I can do. I write in this journal every day and pray that my words have some positive effect somewhere in the world. Whatever teaspoon of wisdom I have comes from decades of trying to overcome my own ignorance. But it does seem futile sometimes when faced with the bland, blind nonsense I see and hear around me, nonsense that is gleefully accepted and seriously put into practice by all of us.

Where are the thinkers? Where did they go? They can't all be hiding out in some secret Bohemian Club, or securely tethered to a University post, or masquerading in a blue collar on some tight lipped assembly line somewhere. Wisdom often comes in strange forms and from unexpected places, but it takes a thinker to recognize it.

I like to read books, journals and magazines hoping to become a thinking person. But I also like to read newspapers because in the haystack of useless ink every now and then someone writes something intelligent. With the demise of newspapers, the haystacks have grown into wastelands. I think so.

To be a real thinker in this age is to be an odd, eccentric, unorthodox, illfitting, dangerous crack pot who has to face the demonic outrage and lethal attack upon himself by the general population. Maybe that's why it is so hard to find any. We need to pray to the great God to let loose a few more thinkers from under His protecting wing.

DB - Vagabond Journeys
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May you have a relaxing weekend.
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