We have stilled the outer landscape in order to name and to know it, and now we are stilling the mind in order to define it.
But, with all our psychological diagnoses and personality labels – the “clinical” landmarks and pathways of our inner landscapes – might we not be wiping away the more expansive, imaginative and qualiadelic parts of our minds? Their usefulness will soon pass as all things decay to be recycled in some form or other.
I have a suspicion that the labels of the mind – though perhaps much like religious dogma, misguided with good intentions – will ultimately fall into the category of stories too far-fetched to even elicit credibility. Only the truly faithful will believe – to the rest of us they will seem, at most, quaint and sentimental like the story of Christmas or Cinderella.
Do not all definitions eventually become blinders – landmarks and pathways we follow but which ultimately keep us from ever seeing the road not taken? The more answers we come up with, do they not dull the mind into submissive acceptance? Do they not inhibit wonder?
As specialization necessitates revolutions to change paradigms, are we not in need of revolutionaries to free us from so much pernicious “self knowledge?” What sort of revolutionaries may these be?
The Tao says:
Without going beyond his doorway
One may know all beneath the sky,
Without peeping out from his window
See the Tao of Heaven go by;
And the farther he goes from home he finds
That knowledge becomes less nigh.
So the sages did not travel
To acquire a knowledge of things,
They named them aright without wasting
Their life in vain journeyings;
And, striving not, accomplished ends
By the power which quietude brings.
So, be still yourself and let the matter and the qualia do the wandering. You’ll get the answers you need.