But part of me weeps for the way I am arrested by these effects, the part that knows there is no gain in pursuit of their appeal. Glitz and glamour aside, material progress cannot arrive at deliverance. You have probably heard the popular mantra used to rally support for school initiatives: "A mind is a terrible thing to waste," it warns. Yet in comic modification of this, some would counsel omitting the last two words, and at times I think they're right. Despite its helpful aspects, my own mind is also the dreaded foe of my greater freedom. It lobbies my welfare for what it wants, often against the advice of what I need. The question thus arises, To what extent can we trust our minds' conclusions? Within its range, the mind's eye may offer exciting insights. It organizes reality into a semi-manageable framework. But does it report the truth? To be sure, we have structured our living on what it sees: our politics, our opinions, our historical record. But is it the source of knowledge that will save us from ourselves? As a species on the ascent, we have put a lot of stock in the promise of reason. "I think, therefore I am," announced Descartes, raising our level of self-importance to a new intellectual peak. If bumper stickers had been around back then, carriages and horse carts would have been plastered with the message. But the real issue had nonetheless been skirted: Am what? Descartes had taken note of form and function. He had weighed the force of will. Yet his was a mainly mechanistic world. And perceptively, so is ours. Focused on the externals we allow to shape us, we behave like thinking machines, and the truth remains at large. Alas, the mind's eye is narrowly trained. As a guide, it is drawn to the earth. Though its vision may lead us to innovative connections, its realm is "out there," a critical distance from where the truth resides. As a result, we deceive ourselves regarding the value of what we claim to have learned. Knowledge is our quest, we proclaim, believing it will pilot us home to the end of sorrow and strife. The more we "figure out," the closer we presume that endpoint to be. Sadly, though, we fail to grasp that knowing has nothing to do with digesting data. Nor can it be uncorked with visible proof. Experience alone evokes it: experience of a purely immaterial nature. Knowing, in fact, is a word we misuse almost everywhere we apply it. Its link is to superconsciousness, not the universe of the senses. I was reminded of this when reading Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban. In one, exquisite irony, he seemed to capture the whole of our situation. "Shipwrecks are usually caused," he said, "by someone knowing exactly where he is." Such is the hubris — and the karmic effect — of we who depend on the actual to inform us. Small or catastrophic, the shipwrecks we sustain in our daily lives are maneuvered into place by the mind's eye. Call it ego or what you will, its information bears a mortal taint, disconnected from pure, divine intuition. As revealed to Raban and countless others, the sea is a powerful setting to illustrate our plight and our potential. Though we sail upon its surface at the mercy of tides, lured by our desires for exotic destinations, tossed by storms, barely catching our breath in respites of calm, a vastness of bliss extends above and below us, unaffected and ever still, awaiting our withdrawal from the turbulent commerce of calculation and selfinvolvement. What so proudly we hail — our intelligence, that is — is also the unwitting catalyst of our worldly woes, from which is there is no escape by logical means. "Out there" is but a strange asylum, no matter how we decorate or describe it. |
Ours is a wondrous age. I, like many others, marvel at the science and technology we have achieved. Mars probes and genome maps arouse my imagination, pushing it past its former limits into uncharted space. Each day, it seems, we accept without effort the advent of new discoveries and convenient devices, moving in stride with a future that speeds into the present.