Between the Linearity
Sensing between the lines for a more intuitive movement through reality
“That subtle Self is to be known by thought there where breath has entered fivefold; for every thought of men is interwoven with the senses, and then thought is purified, then the Self arises.” — Upanishads
When we look at the clouds, most of us tend to see them moving in a singular direction. Our perceptual perspective doesn’t really make it obvious that the masses of vapour are moving much more dynamically than they seem — swirling and coalescing, shifting and dispersing.
Beyond the visual, we also can’t perceptually account for the fulsome composition of the clouds; we know that they’re made of water but we can’t know where along the water cycle each individual particle had originated from, or where/when/how the cloud will dissipate in time.
In essence, there’s more to everything that we can know there to be, and this is something of a beautiful truth to our reality, one that makes it fundamentally, well, real.
For many, such a truth gets lost in the noise of every day monotony—the unknowableness isn’t exactly meant to be at the forefront of our mind unless we dive into some kind of specialized area of focus, and even then.
We’re not exactly meant to get tangled up in all of the mystery, for if we did then we’d adopt some kind of overwhelmed sensory complex, an insanity of the intellect.
But if we employ the right level of curiosity, amidst the right frames of reference with respect to meaning, we can arrive at some pretty cool places on our existential journey through the strangeness of both the knowable and unknowable facets of reality.
And the more we realize that we don’t have to grasp at the unknowns so much as we should appreciate them, the more rewarding (and meaningful) the whole venture suddenly becomes.
Of our interactivity
Think of the thermo-, quantum-, bio-dynamics and the other kind of laws that underpin the matrices of rules and interactions of our perceivable world — electromagnetism, gravity, entropy.
Think too of the more artificially generated dynamics — technological, cultural, economical complexes that influence our functionality.
We know of, and we’ve heard about, the countless layers in between all these functions and interactions; we navigate these nuances on a daily basis.
But it’s the way in which we interact with the most unknown and the most unknowable that seems to have the biggest bearing on our pursuit of the most meaningful forms of knowledge.
When we’re adolescents, the whole world is relatively unknowable, and so our curiosity is emblazoned with an unrelenting passion. Things change as we begin to learn — more so when we begin to think we’ve learned enough.
Things especially stagnate for those who become trapped in the illusionary sense that they’ve learned all that they have to know; that knowledge can be, even on pragmatic or useful terms, finite.
We can become desensitized by the dark actualities of the world; discouraged by the rabbit holes we fall into; displeased with the information we try to discern and dispute.
But if we can maintain a healthy disposition towards our pursuit of knowledge — the kind of knowledge that can only be extracted one painstaking grain at a time from between the lines of certainty — we can immunize ourselves from the kinds of disillusionment that breeds despair.
More importantly, we can stumble into some of the more subtle and revelatory sparks of truth to our world.
We can, at the risk of sounding kitsch, sense these truths.
Therein lies something critical: the truths that we can feel — those are the purest form of knowledge, undiluted and uncontaminated — undeniable.
Ironically, to sense such truth requires something of a leap of faith into the very unknowns that often dissuade us from trying in the first place.
But when we make that leap, it’s never all that regrettable.
Paradoxical release
These unknowable depths of reality should motivate us more than they should discourage us.
In fact, it seems to be some kind of riddle — something of a cosmic finger trap of an idea that the less friction we employ and the less we try to grasp at answers, the sooner we can somehow arrive at realizing them.
We’re quick to assume positions of arrogance, figuring that we know enough about politics or physiology so as to warrant combating an opinion on any such matter.
But how often do we appreciate the fact that we can’t ever know anything with full certainty; the tired adage that the more we learn, the less we know.
How often does a physicist try to sense the particle interactions that they study so fervently? How often does a trier of law actually admit to an instance of their own injustice? How often does a psychologist lose all inhibition to a psychedelic?
While these things do happen, they don’t happen nearly enough; and they only seem to happen at the peaks and pinnacles of curiosity — before a desensitization or disinterest builds up.
How often do we, each and every one of us, actually try to sense the whole that we’re a part and particle of?
Oftentimes, the meaning behind a lot of what we do escapes us — we’re often too zoomed in or too drawn out — and when we do happen to realize it, at some point along our respective journeys, the irony hits hard.
The answer, somewhat comically, lies in our ability to ask the question.
There all along
All this to say that what we seem to be looking for, each of us in each our own way and at our own pace, shouldn’t only be sought via an externality of our conscious operation. It shouldn’t come on the back of being told what to think or adopting the perspectives of others who claim their view or method to be the most worthwhile.
It shouldn’t come, at least entirely, from the outside of our perceptive capacity.
Rather, it should by all conceivable rhyme and reason, emanate from the inside — a tired but powerful truth to most tired revelations that float about, from east to west, from yesterday to today.
The unknowable nuances between the lines of reality as we know it — they’re ours and ours alone to pursue with an inquisitive directness that should never be questioned or contained.
Ultimately, its within this inquisitiveness where the whole journey starts and ends. It’s how and why we feel our way through space and time the way we do.
This simple function that we’ve evolved to employ, often unappreciated, is really everything.
