How to Grasp the Point (Hint: There Is No Point)

[Image: “Day 1: Orientation (Sedona, Arizona),” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Be greeted psychoneurotics!

For you see sensitivity in the insensitivity of the world,
uncertainty among the world’s certainties.

For you often feel others as you feel yourselves.

For you feel the anxiety of the world, and its bottomless narrowness and self-assurance.

For your phobia of washing your hands from the dirt of the world,
for your fear of being locked in the world’s limitations.
for your fear of the absurdity of existence.

For your subtlety in not telling others what you see in them.

For your awkwardness in dealing with practical things, and
for your practicalness in dealing with unknown things,
for your transcendental realism and lack of everyday realism,
for your exclusiveness and fear of losing close friends,
for your creativity and ecstasy,
for your maladjustment to that “which is” and adjustment to that which “ought to be”,
for your great but unutilized abilities.

For the belated appreciation of the real value of your greatness which never allows the appreciation of the greatness of those who will come after you.

For your being treated instead of treating others, for your heavenly power being forever pushed down by brutal force;
for that which is prescient, unsaid, infinite in you.

For the loneliness and strangeness of your ways.

Be greeted.

(Kazimierz Dabrowski [source])

…and:

How is it that I usually seem to be in my body? Partially, because perceiving things from eye-level is the most efficient way of making use of the information coming in from our predominant sense of sight. Blind people feel they are in their fingertips when reading braille. Dogs probably are more inclined to feel they are inside their noses. Exactly where we are depends on how we are perceiving.

It also concerns what we are able to control. It is the ability to control events that gives rise to a sense of self. The technology of virtual reality mimics this. Virtual reality is a computer-generated world in which you can move about as though it were real. The computer detects your movements so that the scenery changes realistically as you walk around and move your head and body. Special gloves that you wear detect the movements of your hands, so that the virtual hand appears to be your hand. And, to you, it seems real. It could be blue, green, or pitted with glowing nodules but it will still seem like you. Virtual reality gives you an illusory sense of control, so it creates a you that feels real, when it is no more than information being processed by a computer. The position where I seems to be depends on the viewpoint that takes in the information and the parts of the world that can be directly controlled.

(Susan Blackmore [source])

…and (italicized portion):

A lead-pencil has a point, an argument may have a point, remarks may be pointed, and a man who wants to borrow five pounds from you only comes to the point when he asks you for the fiver. Lots of things have points: especially weapons. But where is the point to life? Where is the point to love? Where, if it comes to the point, is the point to a bunch of violets? There is no point. Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless...

Life is not a question of points, but a question of flow. it’s the flow that matters.

(D.H. Lawrence [source])

From elsewhere:

We do not need a new religion or a new bible. We need a new experience—a new feeling of what it is to be “I.” The lowdown (which is, of course, the secret and profound view) on life is that our normal sensation of self is a hoax, or, at best, a temporary role that we are playing, or have been conned into playing—with our own tacit consent, just as every hypnotized person is basically willing to be hypnotized. The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego…

As is so often the way, what we have suppressed and overlooked is something startlingly obvious. The difficulty is that it is so obvious and basic that one can hardly find the words for it. The Germans call it a Hintergedanke, an apprehension lying tacitly in the back of our minds which we cannot easily admit, even to ourselves. The sensation of “I” as a lonely and isolated center of being is so powerful and commonsensical, and so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe. I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time—a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body. At this level of existence “I” am immeasurably old; my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply the pulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy.

(Alan Watts [source])

…and:

The Before Picture

It’s complicated, my relationship status
with progress. I often prefer

the “before” picture. The future
is where I’m going only because

I have no choice, because time
moves in one direction, dragging

a bit of itself behind like meat.
An unseen hand keeps

tugging it—time’s rabbit leg,
time’s hunk of red venison—

just out of reach. Did I just describe
the future as bait? Am I strung

along? I know, when I arrive there,
it won’t be there. Won’t be that.

It’ll be now, the way it is
right now. And again. Refresh,

refresh, refresh. The befores
pile up behind me. It’s now again.

(Maggie Smith [source])