Consciousness. Patient, expanding consciousness, growing in awareness from day to day. Sometimes slower, sometimes faster - when a sudden event or inspiration generates a qualititive jump in one's understanding, bringing about a quantum leap to another meta-level. Whatever the pace, the direction is the same; from Zero towards One.
In childhood the world around is made of shapeless blocks, vague monoliths, from which, with age and experience - and the chisel of thought - emerge statues of understanding. From out of crude lumps of unhewn observation they emerge, honed ever more finely, delicately nuanced, catalogued more precisely, with each passing year.
Watch an infant's wide unfocused eyes play over an unfamiliar room, pulling together sense and structure from what is around him. He has seen this all before. No?
We edge slowly along from uncertainty towards certainty, from darkness to light - yet we are not even the tiniest fraction of the infinitely long road from Zero to One.
There can be no rest from this process. We must all learn to unseat the reptile in the brain, that dim and selfish animal, and allow in the angelic; this is spiritual evolution; willing yourself ever closer along that billion year-long path towards God-ness, absolute understanding, total universal unity and infinite consciousness.
We will all die, but the atoms that make us, those atoms currently in formation within our DNA, within our protein - those atoms will keep on spinning as they have done for many billion more years. What have we taught them? For when they return to the soil, they will spin on, bearing with them fragments of memory and will and consciousness. And when they return from out of the dark collectiveness of that soil once more as individual and conscious life, they will be another tiny step closer to God.
This is an unabashedly personal question, but... do you know, when you sit down to write, that, today, you'll write about metaphysics rather than local politics, or photography, or the taming of national legends?
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The more I read your blog, the more I admire not only the different topics you write about, but also your different styles of writing. This post, for example, flows like a poem.
PS: From philosophy to supermarkets!
:)
That's one of the many nice things about this blog. I get stuff about Warsaw and Poland in the whole range - practical to metaphysical.
ReplyDelete@ Michał - I like this post and your perspective. The only major difference in my view is that I think of myself moving more from one to zero than the other way around. From an odd, singular, discrete entity to something more peaceful, harmonious, and integrated. Whatever that means.