To Know–to Dare: to Blaspheme

Posted by J.R.

November 21, 2009

If you only see learning as a process by which you, ignorant, empty yourself of the nothing you have fed your mind and devour the truth (absolute and filling), then you have missed the point. Yes, you are ignorant, but you are also brilliant! We all are. We flower from infant buds into impressively multifunctional adults. We may marvel at the beauty of nature, but it is ridiculous for us to lose sight of the splendour of our natural birthright, perspective, and the potential it offers to Humanity.

In times when we are wrong, or teach ourselves something which is logically inaccurate and damages us, our thoughts still come to bear: they are simply not our best. Instead of minimizing these mistakes, we must celebrate them with our open scrutiny! This is the essence of learning–if we forget the difficulties which have brought us (and others!) to wisdom, then we have failed to learn the truth: instead we have learned ‘a’ truth.

To be individual, we must retain all of ourselves, and abandon the notion that our sins are something to be purged from our minds and memories. If you are not familiar with the dubious origins and dangers of these practices of repression, there is a great deal of historical material available which sheds light on the matter. Adherence to dogmatic absolute thinking cannot, and will never allow human beings to achieve a higher state of mental existence. The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is not poison!

As we eat more Apples of Knowledge, we place more of God in ourselves. I agree with those who consider this blasphemous, but was Satan not created by God? Are the first steps of a toddler, whose muscles and reflexes are infirm, not blasphemous to whatever memory it has of its infant state? To dare is to blaspheme as to see is to not see everything else which you are not currently looking at; one connotes positively and the other connotes negatively, but both are core components of the learning process.

When Humanity is at its most base, we lack empathy, logic, and contextual comprehension. We wave standards for our beliefs as though we know infinity on the authority of our ancestors, and murder one another in cold blood: in spite of our stated belief in our mutual origins. If we may learn anything from history, it is that beliefs have masked the greatest tragedies as well as the greatest successes of our species.

Belief in the holiness of celibacy rests for many in direct contradiction with the commandment, the biological impulse, to reproduce: unless marriage is involved. What does marriage connote, beyond the obvious commitments between the partners? Marriage is a statement to Humanity that two minds have met, that they understand one another, and that they believe that their lives will achieve more potential together than apart. If producing a child enters into the equation (1 + 1 = 3, or in Adam and Eve’s case, 1 + 1 = everyone who has ever lived and died), then that new life must be understood by both parents as their responsibility.

Accidental production of children may (and should, and will) occur, but we must remove the primitive blindfold which tells us, “We do not decide who lives and dies.” We make those decisions every day. After thousands of years of struggle with this issue, technology has finally reached a point which allows us to practice population control through mindful use of medicine. Now that we have the means, we must learn to apply wisdom to our reproductive practices with the goal of maximizing our lives’ potential within the limited economic framework which we provide one another, and therefore provide a future to Humanity. In order to accomplish this goal, we must not only plan to have children, but plan for our children. We must teach them all the information that we can, but we must also teach them wisdom, so that their stumbles retread ours as little as possible, and so that they may have plans for themselves beyond ours and fixing our mistakes. The essence of genius is making new mistakes: not repeating clichés for the sake of validation.

No person can accomplish alone what large, organized groups are capable of. A civilization as a whole may arrive at genius, when circumstances are right, and produce gifts to Humanity which may be uniquely identified by their era and culture. The clichéd mistake human civilizations make is to end in war. The financial and human cost of war is now available in concrete figures to us, and accounts of how many trips to Mars (or even Europa) could be afforded if we forsake war are themselves thoughtlessly forsaken for more war. Our allegiance must be to our species and to life itself; murder (and often, life) exclusively for individual gain is pointless and only delays and blocks Humanity’s progress.

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