| | okay i'll put it back up...
My name on here, Cognoscere, is Latin for "to know". My life's drive is to know. Nothing in particular, just know. Maybe not to understand, but at least to know. What a wondrous being we are, humans, when we can know something and not quite understand. In the 'wild', things seem so simple: live! But humans, we've a whole complex system of life: not only to live, but to love, to hate, to help, to hurt, to create, to destroy, to learn, to forget, to understand, to not care. Sometimes when I despair I wish I was a simpleton, someone living only to survive without a care. But then as I think this, I wonder "Why do I want that?" and the whole process of knowing starts and before I know it I've shunned any chance of a simple life. I'm the type that wants truth, the kind of truth that hurts, because I can't stand to not know. I find solace in that pain that can be found in truth, because for me that is the purpose of life. I've said before that there is no real point to life - there is only what we make of it. To some, life is about money, or family, or love, or charity, or personal ambition, or God. To me life is about seeking truth, or what ever shadow of Truth God grants us. I believe the search for truth is the search for God; and to bring that another step farther, is a search for yourself. We want to find God in truth, and indeed God is Truth; and through God we want to know ourselves. I believe we all know ourselves - no one else knows you better than yourself. However, knowledge and understanding are different, and I seek God through truth to understand myself. Of course we know ourselves, we know how we act, what our beliefs are, what our reactions are, and what we would do in a certain situation. But we (well, me!) are at a loss to understand why we do these things, especially when they are things that hurt others or ourselves. To know that if presented with a situation you would do the 'wrong' thing, or you know that you would do it again, unleashes a flood of emotion inside yourself if you pay attention. People who carry out affairs, steal from others, or skip out on their responsibilities do these things conciously. These things aren't spur of the moment, or instinct - they are planned out, to a certain degree. People who do these are likely to do it again and again, whenever the oppurtunity presents itself, while many will resist the temptation, to their benefit. And whatever bad things we do, we still consider ourselves good people. Everyone has given in to a temptation at one point or another, maybe not those listed above, and would do it again if they could. One thing that reassures us we are indeed good people after we do a bad thing is guilt. Some thrive on guilt, they nurse it and they grow it, as if guilt creates virtue. I am one of these people. I do things I am ashamed of - I let people down, a set a bad example, I don't do all that I could do, etc. - and though I'm not ashamed of much that I do, those things that I am create an acute sense of guilt within me. I don't do it to feel bad, I actually do it to feel better. I need to know that I am not some being void of feeling or decency. Guilt reassures me that I have a conscience and that guilt gives me the impetus to be a better person, though God knows I often fail to answer the call to rise up. What's interesting is when we do things that we know are wrong in other's eyes and yet don't repent or have guilt. Does this make us bad people? I guess it all depends on what was done and who, if anyone, it affected. Often times the things that we do that are wrong, but that we have little or no guilt for, are gratifications for the self, whatever those actions may be. For instance, lying to your parents about where you're going to go see the one you secretly love- you've betrayed your parents trust, though they may not know it, and gratified your heart (or maybe something else - love and lust are sometimes hard to distinguish in early stages, and often they come in a pair) by seeing the one you crave. Is that wrong? If you were the parent, you'd think so; but if you were the one who snuck out, would think it was wrong? How could it be wrong when it feels so good, and if your parents never find out? That's tough, especially for those who love their parents very much. But let's complicate matters - what if you subsitute your parents for your boyfriend, or girlfriend, or husband, or wife? Certainly, in my mind, there is no doubt that if you sneak out to see many people behind your significant other's back. That's just lust. But what if its one single person? Does that make it better, or worse? I know the vast majority will say both are wicked, and I am inclined to that decision - but then again we have never been in that situation if we feel that way. The thing about the heart is that you cannot help it. You cannot force yourself not to develop feelings for someone, though you cn try to pen your heart in by avoiding that someone. Fairy Tale notions of love will say when you're truly in love, you will never be attracted to anyone else, and that if you develop feelings for another than you must not love the one you're with. But let's get real - life is not so clear cut. It is not black and white, it is complex, and this complexity makes life wonderful, though it can also confound things. I believe that you can love one to pieces, with all your self and still become attracted to another. (and no D I'm not, silly, I'm just moralizing in my head :P) Love will not be reigned, love is an entity in its own that seizes us by the very fibres of our hearts and souls and caresses us while stabbing us at the same time. It will do what it wants, it will grow or dissipate as it desires. So I could see and even understand someone's position that I just described. Even when you are single, and you have a budding love all you want to do is be with that person. You become infatuated, and infatuation is a sort of elated madness, where the fires of love burst - true love starts when that fires catches and doesn't go out. But infatuation is a burst of feeling that completely immerses you, and though a person may love another to a point they cannot even understand, if infatuation arose for someone else it would consume them. However, I believe there is wrong done when someone acts on that infatuation - but I don't think we could rightly blame one for how they feel. They honestly can't help it. Life is inexorable, unavoidable, a force that cannot be meddled with. We are like a musical instrument, a harp or a violin. The instrument itself is us, our bodies; the strings are our hearts, our souls, our feelings; Life is the hand that plays us. When you play a guitar, it doesn't fight back, it reacts to what your hand does to it. It makes music, and music is our daily life, our emotions, our feelings - sometimes it is a very simple tune, with single notes following a simple scale; sometimes it is a complex system of chords, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in chaos. We are instruments; instruments of life, of God, of others. Everything affects us and we cannot help it. Therefore, I think if I were to ever have someone tell me that they had feelings for another, I would not get mad. I'd get sad, and worried of course, but how could I rightly be mad? If those feelings were acted on, and stuff happened, I would be hurt, and perhaps, depending on the situation, mad. We can know how we feel; we can know we have feelings for another, or we can know that we love only one person; we can know we are trustworthy, or we can know we are not; we can know everything little bit about ourself, but still not understand. For instance, take Gordon Lightfoot's song "If you could read my mind": " never thought I could feel this way, And Ive got to say that I just to get it. I dont know where we went wrong, But the feelins gone, And I just cant get it back." He knows how he feels, he knows what's happened or is happening, but for the life of him he cannot understand why. Some things we may never understand, especially about ourselves and others. But when we do understand something, we are awed. When we know why our heart does what it does, we see things more clearly, we are humbled by the fact that we are just puppets to ourselves.
And to know God is to humbled. One cannot ever hope to know and understand God without humbling their self. The same goes for knowing and understand yourself. The more you find out about yourself, the more you are humbled, for you realize how flawed you really are.
And after all this dribble, what do I now understand? What do you now understand? I personally don't think I understand anything more clearly now. But I am perhaps closer to an understanding than before, and that is all I can hope for. I know that I know myself, how I feel, who I love, and who I am. I have done things that I am guilty of, but some of these thing I would not repent of them nor wish I hadn't done them; for it is when things go wrong that we learn about who we are; when we do things that are wrong, and we are guilty about it, we have to look deep into our selves and ask "why did I do that?" And if we can answer that question, then we can learn that much more about our self. A life of purpose is one driven by self-reflection, as well as reflection on God, the world, and others. They are all interconnected, all affecting each other, all making music through us. Through reflection on the self and others we can gain understanding; through specific self-reflection we gain humility for we see just how flawed we are, as an individual, and as a race; yet we also see that despite these flaws we are good people who have been thrown into this life that works on us, forever plucking our strings.
finis
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