Jumping the fence

There is a saying that goes “it is what it is” and it’s often used as an aid to accept circumstances which we have no power over. Relating back to previous post on ignorance which we’ll now look at from a different angle the statement of things being what they are is only true if we can come to know, not understand, but know what they are. Being informed is one thing, to intellectually understand something but to know is to see through the stories applied upon something. It involves digging all the way to the root of things, that is where we will really find “what they are”. Without the digging it’s all just debris on the ground from where a stem protrudes and supposedly branches out to carry some kind of fruit. It is true that it also “is what it is” but what it is is clutter and noise that lead to nothing but confusion. Any person with a slight knack of OCD ought to find this disturbing and I believe many of us do but we also come to learn how to adapt to it with expressions like the one discussed above. There is admittedly a comfort there but as far as I can tell that kind of comfort is what leads us to confusion and in the long run a much unhappier world than what would really be necessary.  A bold statement perhaps and of course I don’t know, yet. So far, I’m merely sharpening my shovel and clearing the grounds from the clutter so that I can start digging. There will be truth down there, so many seekers before us know this. Besides, even if there isn’t at least it is a harmless way to spend our time. 

However, going through the clutter of my own ignorance I find that the very ground upon which I base my reflection is anything but a rigid structure. This base is much bigger than my own personal belief as it is a creation of collective neglect. Patched together by mutual assumptions is a platform held up by pillars based in ignorance and welded together by fear, pride and aversion. I’m not an engineer but well an architect by training and from what I can see this structure is unsound, unsafe and there ought to be a better way to build and to start doing so on a solid foundation. 

There is already a lot of focus on self-awareness, finding one’s purpose and self-manifesting through different means and methods out there. I’m a fan and encourage most kinds of self development but it has also led me to ask: What do we base this kind of development on? What if we are looking for answers where they can’t be found? Could the reason why we feel lost and not sure about who we are, what we are supposed to do or where we fit in be because the world we try to fit into isn’t actually the real thing but a collective construct we just try our best to adapt to? As if we were in a paddock framed by a fence that was built by the critical mass and within it we are left to grace lands that just aren’t nutritious. With a hedge of ideas so tall that they block our horizon we come to take it for granted. Some of these ideas are money, success and borders. Admittedly money and success are things we do have the opportunity to personally deflect and redefine for ourselves, but borders is one of those things that won’t budge and literally solidifies the framework of our castle in the skies. We all relate to them in one way or another and have come accept their significance. Yet if we were to actually look for them as something that exists outside of our collective idea they would never be found. An imaginary line dividing one place of this planet from another, defining here and there, us and them. Only certain people are allowed to walk across the line and when they do they are expected to declare who they are and what they intend to do while they’re there, as if anyone really knew the answer to any of those questions. These days the idea of a border has grown so powerful that people are ready to risk their life in order to cross them. At the same time others have become so convinced of the lines’ importance that they are willing to stop these people by any means possible. It’s an idea, not real, not inherent truth, it’s nothing but one of the rigidly welded pillars that hold up the platform upon which we desperately try to fit in. If that is not reality based on ignorance I don’t know what is.

It is in situations like this where the confusion leads to unhappiness. Not only with the idea of national borders but with any ideologies that we are born into and take for granted. No truly happy person would ever have the idea to raise a gun towards another man. No happy person would ever have the desire to control anyone else. But, as things are, these people are not in that realm of happiness. Together with the rest of us they are corralled in the paddock fenced by insecurity, fear and greed. Perhaps it is time for us to jump that fence and see where the real limit really is?

I get how this confusion can come to be and how the platform keeps being patched and strengthened any time it is rattled. It’s the comfort of the known and the fear or discomfort of the unknown that sparks the welding torch. As we are born we are immediately lost in the world. More so in the industrialized world where the problem solving part of us has taken over and runs amok there is no longer an inherent connection to the self as a part of the world, more as a part in the world. But we adapt and begin to look for our place amongst it all. We look for a belonging and a personal identity. Borders gives us this without having to do anything for it, which again is convenient but that doesn’t make them more real. It is also in our system to divide things from each other, after all that is what defines the dualistic world, separation. Perhaps we perceive the world in this way because we, our very being is ultimately framed with a start and an end and thus feel an inherent need to define everything else as finite as well? We live, then we die, now there’s a pillar you can lean on. If everything else was defined by the same validity things would be perceived for what they are, i.e ideas would remain as ideas. 

The real limit in our lives is life itself and if we truly want understand who we are within that frame we have to go beyond the fence and abandon the unsound structure of belief and ignorance. What you will find there is death, for now that is all you really know. But take this fact as a reassurance that as long as you know it will come it means that you haven’t reached there yet.