Metaphysics

The Meaning Well

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There is no meaning to existence to be found without the meaning in existence. And we know there is meaning in existence, even in our deficient quest for it, even when our quest for it is rendered deficient by our expectations of what we want to find.

Yet our commitment to the quest is enough to change the reality, and gird our failures along the way, for how else would we judge our own failure without a sense of what we are looking for – which is our hidden strength.

Only sometimes we hide that strength from ourselves – sometimes by giving in to failure, sometimes by reducing it to serve our ill-judged wants, which never satisfy. Thereby we forget how much more is to be gained when we stop looking for it as something to get, and see it instead as something to give, thereafter to be refreshed from the fathomless depths of its creative abundance.

Mike Laidler

Mindscapes

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The mind is unbounded. Thought travels further than the voyaging spacecraft. Our ideas see beyond the most powerful telescopes. The imagination takes us to places the body cannot follow. Perception illuminates the half-born light. Experience transforms the oblivious firmament. Knowledge transforms the unknown. Wisdom transcends the not-knowing.

No library is big enough to contain human wisdom, and it has always been so. But then we imagined limits to the imagination in the wake of technological advances once unforeseen; and we imagined that the mind of technology could overtake us, as if thought belongs to the thingness of the universe.

So the mind did to itself what nothing else could do – it bound itself in thoughts of its own limitations. Thus we stole our attention away from the wisdom of our ancestors who looked to powers extending beyond themselves – powers seen to transform the thingness of existence within a larger universe that expands into thought, then beyond within realisations we catch as figments of the imagination – a universe that is incomplete in all that is of the time being – a universe with a future that is more than all that it is in the present, that always was more than all that is, because of the enduring potential to be.

Mike Laidler

Realisations

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From life to death, science to religion, chance to change, imagination to reality, ignorance to knowledge – the narrow limits that generate facts to focus our attention change within broader limits we know nothing about. For in each case, the narrow limits belong to us, whilst we see them otherwise, as belonging to the facts.

Mike Laidler