the confusion of our times, A Human Strategy, aphorism 386
386
Often a great act is not truly great; it is only the confusion of our times that is great. We deny what we do. We seem to require ... even crave the confusion, have a vested interest in gripping and holding back the ever flowing tendencies of nature with monstrous demands: “Nature must be that. I command it not to be this.”
We all have our doubts and fears and want a certainty secured, fixed in time and space, something to cling to so as not to be swept away into the uncertain. And so in great or small acts we grip and hold back what would otherwise flow on nobly according to its own law of becoming.
This “certainty” stands as a giant monolith in the great river of time, not stopping so much as flooding and stripping away the surrounding soil, striking out into jagged forks what had until then been coming together ... what would have remained tributaries toward a simpler, grander force are now trickling streams and stagnant puddles.
What is it that we “believe”? That repetition is boredom ... that we must and can escape the natural tendency to finish where we begin.
This escape ... this false “certainty” is the confusion on whose behalf we cling to immovable measures which fix that very confusion into place ... and for which, in such a panic, we cling to our monolith all the more fervently, that being the “great” and “immovable” Savior.
By ruler and pen, we etch out our goals in straight lines, from point A to point B, today and tomorrow and thereafter ... never seeing that this straight line is but a single small point along equally real points of a great cycle, spiraling up toward an unintended and unseen point C. Thus, when I walk from point A to point B, two journeys take place: one of space and one of evolution — the linear journey completed in its thousand steps horizontally included a vertical step — a higher destination — the stronger traveler.
It is the truly great act in life to simplify one’s own circumstance: with one command, to let go of this fixed monolith to chaos, have this letting go settle one’s existence into comprehensible layers ... to resist all that would stop and have sensory objects fixed in place. In this, we seem contrary to nature, even in our most natural state, for we resist those leaden desires which all others believe imperative. We grip the only valuable reality, the ultimate truth, the light of all things: repetition, also known by the name of its consequence, becoming. But to place this one jewel firmly within our grip, we must empty our hand of all else. One cannot have the repetition of instances by holding onto a single instance.
Our “stopping place” is with the flow of the river, as a bark which floats downriver is fixed to the flow, and for this we cut loose every certainty and desire which would moor us to our own times.