Anaximander

At each age our thinking evolves a little bit further. At the earliest times, perhaps an awakening, or dawn of awakening of consciousness, the world taken as given with starry skies above, the roots below, the nature which gave sustenance as well as threats to existence. The mind grapples with the 'known' and understood reality and all the reality that still defies understanding, and tries to put the life amidst all that in some narrative coherence with some meaning, justification and eventual fairness. 

Then came the age of believing the centrality of earth, and the roving heavens around us. Perhaps aided by more observation, a culmination of thinking, a cumulative chain of thoughts and observation reaching a tipping point, trying to fit the known and unknown in a new model of reality.

Then came more observation, more instruments, printing press, a frothing and networking of knowledge, a bigger reality revealed like those squares in minesweeper. And now we have an entirely different model of the universe from a few hundred years ago. 

I just wonder what the next few hundred years will reveal about the known and unknown in our universe.

*

It makes philosophic sense in one way to put the earth/us in the center of the things. We see the world from our heads, the reality exists as a construction of our perception. Time exists because we are here to feel it pass. 

At some point, my personal experience reveals all time as being eternally present. That all that is to be is there already. We just roll through it, live through it. And if you wander down those paths, a huge veil of confusion, clutter and random binds of your own nurturing are thrown at you. As if the mind on reaching some invisible no-go zone reacts against itself. What sets this no-go zone? Knowing the world we do, our matrix, our model of living, and knowing, there'll be little value if everything is known. I do not wish to know. I do not know what leads future to my head in the present. Is it not wishing to know that throws up the resistance with its own sand and soil thrown over its own eyes? My fight against myself because something random has unclipped in this shabby universe.

And I get all emotional. I wouldn't call it shabby, even though nothing seems to respond to my cries of help, I tend to agree with Anaximander and his mercies of time. I am too little, too insignificant a thing to be bothered with. A transient drop of water in the ocean of existence. Gone before the ocean even begins to suspire. Who or what will match my rythm or wavelength. It is not even a message in a bottle which survives time and waves, it is a faint whisper to the stars, a wave or ripple I send out which amidst all the noise of this world and the emotional tugs and messages to heavens will get lost in the crowd. 

So it is momentary, the wave of emotion passes. What stays is this wonder. This wonder at the universe and a sort of frustration with myself. Can deal better with all this. Can write better sentences. Can have better attitude. Can have more patience to hold in tears which come bubbling out given continuouusly scraped heart. Can just decide, as they say, to be like this, and not like anything else - just a good attitude, sunny disposition, and cheerful smile. But where does one put away the tears? By just skipping across the river on the stones of good cheer, ignore the river completely. When completely alone, perhaps dip into it, but leave a part of you outside to pull you out.

*

Anaximander: “Whence things have their origin, thence also their destruction happens according to necessity; for they give justice and recompense to one another for their injustice according to the ordering of time.”

I love the words the ordering of time. He begins with apeiron, and then one can see him tracing reality arising from eternity and in time, falling back to eternity. The imbalance arises as things separate, try to balance each other, I like to think more as a dance step and merging and flowing into each other that needs to be mastered with restraint rather than any two separate elements separating. It is one, yet it parts with itself, for play perhaps. And meanwhile, for us, in our time scale, we live out a small portion which just happens to be a pixel, never whole that way, but in itself, the reality is whole, and everything is sorted in time. The only problematic factor is the ego, the I, the self, which feels. Perhaps that's why the ancients suggest its abosrption, its dissolution, its assimiliation into something of a bigger scale or its letting go. It is too much to ask the universe to bend itself to a little pixel. the way a human body cannot bow to one atom of its existence, or one quark. Too much. Scale issues, plane issues. So it is simpler to let go of the ego, any expectations, and dance to the rhythm and flow of the universe. Perhaps if any resolution, or wholeness, it lies that way.

As to the narrative resolution, that is just our mind, at this plane of existence. One needs to transcend this plane, and I don't know how, and it cannot be explained in the same grammar of living as this plane, the way one state changes. One is physically different chemically before a workout and after a workout. One's thoughts are different. So perhaps - this, that we do not control ourselves. We can just about help shape our environment, our chemicals to an extent. And they all together play on us and create the internal scenery which lead us to different kinds of actions. 

Sometimes it is words that help shape the environment, and hence hence hence their magic. Like Anaximander opens this in me. I didn't wake up knowing or planning it. It is his magic. And one cannot plan or control with these things. One just about learns to dance.