Another way to put this is that in reality nothing ever quite fits.
When we climb a mountain, when do we reach the top? I've often wondered when that exact moment comes. We get higher and higher and navigate ourselves up to the summit, but the gradient usually gradually levels off and you are always left looking for that highest point. You take the summit photos and then realise that if you stand on a different rock or pebble you are a bit higher. Rare would be that mountain that ends in a flake of rock with a point on it to mark the highest point. And even then if you zoom in there is still the question of which bit of that flake represents the top. Its never an exact fit for the idea of the "top." We usually get happy with roughly the top. But i wonder how many people think they have summited but not actually reached the very highest point. I know I have.
Returning to Plato's Forms there must be a trade off. For so many millions of apples to count as "apples" we must ignore many of their differences. They cannot all be identical copies, atom for atom. This means that if we pick a particular apple, like Heraclitus with his toe in the river that is never the same twice, it will be unlike any other apple. It means that the word "apple" can only be an approximation, a rough category or container, that doesn't really capture the unique nature of a particular apple.
So it is with this idea of "self." Its a broad handle on "me" that misses out almost everything. Inside this container is a being which is barely recognisable from the crude label of "self."
This is another avenue that takes us to freedom. Just as the exact point at the top of a mountain is hard to pin point in reality, so the exact place and moment of self is hard to pin point. It seems easy to say "I am happy" but look closer where exactly is the happiness. When exactly did it start, when will it end, where is it? There is no discrete thing to grasp there, it is a swirling river. The river flows around and through the crude box called "self" and the label "self" seems to capture almost nothing. Before we know it the happiness has subsided and we have new feelings coming about. Realising that we simply cannot grasp at a solid thing called "self" brings us to just accept the chaotic mess. We're not quite sure if we stood on the exact top of the mountain, but it was a great day's mountaineering and we're happy with the messy way the world is. We're not quite sure if that counted as "me" but we're happy with the mess.
Now it gets a bit more complicated because we have this idea of "existence." I may not be able to pin point exactly what I am at any one moment, was that "happiness" or was it slightly tinged with "melancholy" or maybe I was already starting to feel sad cos I remembered something. Like Heraclitus with his toe in the ever swirling river. Yet the river does exist even if we can't say what exact state it is in, and I do exist even if the details evade me. But its not so simple as this. Existentialism has done the human race an enormous disservice.
Back to that discussion of containers on Christmas Day. Can we really talk about a river while missing out ALL the details? Surely in the discussion the actual nature of the swirling mass of water must be addressed somewhere. Sartre would rather separate existence and essence so much that we can talk about the river without ever looking at a drop of water. His reason would be like the apples. This apple is not any other apple, it is itself. We then examine this apple and only then do we get the details that mark it apart from other apples. But you can turn that around. Without some phenomenon why are you even talking "apple"? Surely there must be some phenomenon that got us started. And Sartre says but it is the existence of that phenomenon that got us going, the spark of "somethingness" or a "happening" that triggers our interest and examination of exactly "what" the essence of that happening is. But you can't have a happening without something happening. You cannot separate the existence and the essence like that. It is when you do that you end up with the nonsense of Existentialism and the belief in an individual self completely separate from anything else. And existence without any essence in fact if you look closely.
Imagine trying to capture a bottle of drink being poured into another bottle. Simple when its all been transferred we say there is it, the drink is now there. But now try and capture in a sieve. At no point can you say where the bottle of drink is. Indeed is there a bottle of drink any more? It's a mess again. It's only the people still trying to fit it into the container of "a drink" that start complaining that it has been spilled and wasted. Its true that we are all familiar with drink bottles and spilling drinks, so someone turning up on the scene after it has happened will quickly work out it really belongs in a bottle and has been spilled. But actually there is no bottle of drink anymore, its gone and is now a puddle or something else. Given how messy the bottle of drink is, its not so clear whether it really exists. Perhaps on the shop shelf its easy to convince ourselves its a solid existing thing. But as time progresses it gradually stops being a bottle of drink. Everything is in this state of change, of being created, existing for a while in some inexact but recognisable state and then decaying. Even that mountain the next time we climb it will have eroded and the rocks be in slightly different positions.
We say "exist" like its a fixed thing. Yet nothing is fixed, and everything has fuzzy boundaries.
What is exact are our thoughts. Our thoughts have discrete boundaries, they are the containers. And we spend our life tring to force things into thought containers so we can carry them around. "I have climbed Mountain X" we out in a container and carry it around. When we thin back of course "climbing mountain X" was a long process with 1000s of steps and things going on. Its a simple container for a quite unique experience.
So we meditate to learn to separate the thoughts from the reality. The Nama from the Rupa they say.
Plato preferred to live in the perfect realm of Forms, that is thoughts, where things were exactly this and exactly that. In his cave he describes the particular imprints of the forms as just shadows.
But why place a hierarchy here. There are forms, there are thoughts. But the world barely fits into them. Thoughts have a truly bad tailor you might say. When events happen, we finds the thoughts very inadequate.
There is a clear temptation to hold on to the thoughts cos with these we feel we have something tangible to hold on to. But if we look underneath the layer of thoughts we see the swirling river of reality that really doesn't fit.
Why enter the swirling river we might think. Well its only swirling from the standpoint of the thoughts. But if we let go of the thoughts and experience the river then it stops being this and that but just becomes a flow without especial boundaries.
The problem with trying to say this is you can't capture the laid back peace of accepting the flow in words. Words always want things to be this way or that. and indeed we can--and do-- make these decisions of whether it is this way or that. But think about it. Before you have decided what way something is, don't we have to be in an undecided state? And that is not a discrete undecided state, but just a fuzzy "kind of" state which becomes clearer and then less clear all the time. Being able to stick it in a container is no longer a big deal. We add a label, we take one away, we change our mind, but we are being really precise because we are being sensitive to the changing world around us.
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