January 31, 2007 at 19:10:58

Intelligence is surrender to the ordinary

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By W. Christopher Epler (Bill) (about the author) Page 1 of 2 page(s)

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Where you are right now is as real as it gets. Forget about all that after death business and "Gee, I'm so special!" stuff. That's the world, that's science, that's religion. "Look at me Mom, I'm doing what I should be doing!" Buzz, buzz goes the cicadas. Remember those long summer nights; remember that pulsing drone in the dark? "Look at me Mom, I'm doing what I should be doing!"

Science is a little like network marketing. It keeps overreaching itself. Religion, of course, can be a thousand times worse. Look at religious fanatics. Something much too glassy-eyed there, don't you think? Remember Elizabeth Taylor's great line in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" when she said to George (Richard Burton), "I'd divorce you if you existed." Samo, samo for the righteous. Null sets on parade.

But what's wrong with science? Nothing's "wrong" with it, it's just too specialized to be pontificating (however implicitly) about totality.

Intelligence doesn't belong to science, e.g., mathematics, physics, genetics, etc.; it belongs to ITSELF. Intelligence is the self-experiencing of that which thought thinks about (and doesn't think about). "And just how to I know that?" you ask. Well ask away, but there isn't any "I" here to answer that question since intelligence doesn't belong to the name/face identity on the driver's license of this bipedal life form either.

So who's saying all this then? No "one's" saying it! Who's Pacific Oceaning the Pacific Ocean? Does life really have to have all these ball bearing identities to live the living? Enough already with language hypnosis.

But, I digress ("wiping off blood with blood," as a zenist once said). A digression from what? You tell me, what's the ordinariness of YOUR life? And please excuse the personal pronouns. They're denotative meaningless, but you have to bake your bread somewhere.

poetry peeks under our skirts
since we tend to forget
our legs
are still there.

EVERYTHING is food for intelligence, but we keep settling for pap from the past. Plus, any "science" worth taking seriously wouldn't limit itself to eyeballs and equations anyway -- plus ignoring alternative realities is criminally myopic.

Immediacy is unimaginably more mysterious than death and quantum physics. Or St. X. Or Equation Y. Or Dr. Z. The problem is how and where do we begin. It's easy to say I'm CONSTANTLY living in a hurricane of challenge, but I've got to sink my teeth in something, somehow, somewhere . . . don't I? Well, it helps to know questions don't have to be answered. Questions are the tail; we're the dog.

where am I?
who am I?
lub dub, lub dub
Bub.

So This, as they say, is It. The Kingdom of the Point Blank. Well then, what are we waiting for? But why do we think we have to find a scientist or religioso to tell us what to do? Hey, it's right here -- the eye of the needle. All that religion/science stuff can be useful, even elegant, but the "density" of non-theoretical realness isn't sum-uppable by black or white (lab coats) cassocks. Dear God (i.e., dear Metaphor), if it's real, it's intelligence food.

Basically, we know 2 (count em', 2) paths through the jungle of ISness. I bet porpoises know 17. Back & forth, back & forth, back & forth; our two note symphony of religion and science. BORing (as our children would say). And boring it is. It's like knowing 2 people on a convention floor and thinking everything else is white noise . . . while flicker, flicker goes other dimensions.

Quantum jump time! But not to otherness, to thisness. To ORDINARINESS, since life, reality (or your biggie of choice) equals ordinariness. Which is more real? Our obsessive "thinking about" (e.g., Hawking physics) or the raw material, givenness we so greedily keep trying to capture in thought's butterfly nets?

And greed DOES play a role in this. Greed and/or hubris and/or insect conditioning. Memory dreams up (literally) its intellectualized simulations and off we go! Hell, we aren't even doing it. We are what are "being done".

A Holy Grail legend admonishes us that the quest begins with going into the forest alone, where it is darkest, and where there is no path (a gift from the 12th Century!). The contemporary philosopher/mystic J. Krishnamurti says, "Truth is a pathless land," and a farmer tells the lost urbanite who wants to find his way back to the city, "I don't think you can get there from here."

But none of this is despair. It's simply saying the self evident. Flashlights of memory/conditioning see only what they CAN see, i.e., recognize, as in re-cognize. And just this is the glory of myth and poetry. How else do we communicate about members without sets?

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