11 August 2005

Wisdom

Wisdom resides in the body and energy rather than the mind.
It is already there, around us & within us, it need not be constructed.
It comes from untangling the threads of energy and being, and allowing them to interact as they should within the web of our existence.
This is not a thought process but one of relaxing and connecting and allowing the connexions to transform and take you forwards and more deeply into the process.
Thoughts and language always enter a long time after the event: they destroy the event.
The well-trained thinking mind is clever and can extrapolate into many areas it really has no experience of.
It runs away with itself into theory and speculation – the universe of discourse – at the drop of a hat.
It creates its own world, parallel to the world of connectedness but not of it.
These worlds are by no means mutually exclusive but experience of one has little bearing on the other.
The problem is that a well-trained thinker often feels he is capable in other arenas.
Thinking is really just taxonomy spread large: all untangling but no reconnexion.
Taxonomy leads to taxidermy: you are left with a world of stuffed objects – shadows of their former selves.
What you truly know you should be.

One of the many refreshing things about rural living is that the local people are not generally sophisticated.
They are very practical people: of their environment.
They are not overly busy and have time to digest their experiences and allow them to settle into a body of experience.
They are stacked from the ground up: feet firmly on the earth.
Their interactions with you tend to be of the earth rather than the head, chthonic rather than neurotic, and so their company is nourishing and settling rather than stimulating and exciting.
They are strong, energetic, and practically sensitive in that they respond to what is there rather than what they think or feel is there.
Practical philosophers.
I have learnt a lot here and am not relishing the move back to the big shitty.

4 comments

Anonymous said...

Agree with 99% of what you say. The remaining 1% will have to wait until I get a better dictionary (cthonic?)

taiji heartwork said...

chthonic thon'ik, adj relating to the earth or the underworld and the deities inhabiting it. [Gr chthon, chthonos the ground]

I maybe should have used autochthonous from the Greek autochthon sprung from the soil, partly because it is a term used in psychology meaning: (of an idea) coming into the mind with no apparent connexion to the subject's train of thought

I love language (lang-wedge as Ezra Pound spelt it). Its intricacies, associations and richness.

taiji heartwork said...

Not sure one would ever use autochthonous to mean down-to-earth. It's more from the earth - aboriginal.

autochthonous \aw-TOK-thuh-nuhs\, adjective:
1. Aboriginal; indigenous; native.
2. Formed or originating in the place where found.

"For cultures are not monoliths. They are fragmentary, patchworks of autochthonous and foreign elements."
Anthony Pagden, "Culture Wars," The New Republic, November 16, 1998

"I thought of the present-day Arcadians, autochthonous, sprung from the very earth on which they live, who with every draught from a stream drink up millennia of history and legend."
Zachary Taylor, "Hot Land, Cold Water," The Atlantic, June 17, 1998
Autochthonous derives from Greek autochthon, "of or from the earth or land itself," from auto-, "self" + chthon, "earth."


"May try industrious lapping at lakeside. Old habit at a glance but the punctilious rails glean rye. All I've ever envisaged careens floorboardward in an imagination of tiles. Try to pry information off the fuselage, push raw metal endeavor tied to a post. Tangled organs were Gorky's parking spot. There's air outside an idea, more space than meets the eye. The pull is furious, flag snap in storm. All along the warm interior of the mouth houses resource. The elevated crash diction completes the image sentence. But behind that these interpolations can never get, the base slides noiselessly under foot, buildings heave into view, and an accelerated procedure takes up the slacks and drapes them over a chair."

From Autochthonous Redaction by Kit Robinson

taiji heartwork said...

The whole Kit Robinson poem is available online.