BY

DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

I wonder if it utterly impossible to separate mind from body, or to disentangle love from hate, peace from war, life from death, or to resolve ambiguities and ambivalences into respective antonymic counterparts, or to divide the antipodal moments of all the antinomies at once hence altogether interrupt the continuum of everything that is.

I wonder, what is the cause of my confusion? I see that some things follow others as effects follow causes, and those effects in turn become causes with effects following them; each series winnowed out of the Complex by the mind constitutes a storyline that might be laid down convincingly provided that I follow the rules of logic, which may expose the falseness of an argument, but alas, it cannot prove anything true , so my winning arguments are myths, so to speak, though they have some basis in reality, such as the triunal myth, grounded in the perception of the nuclear family, in the name of the father, the mother, and the child, as one.

I think that I think that my consciousness is unilateral or one-sided in the sense that it is logical hence follows a distinct line of reasoning according the rules of the road. Something either is or it is not, meaning that it is not impossibly nothing but is something else again; one thing cannot be itself and something else at once. To say that two equals one is absurd, and to say that two things are derived from their equality, which is a third thing, is even the more so.

Then the Trinity may be rejected as utterly absurd if not unholy, as may be the divinity of matter once differences are drawn between it and spirit. Still I believe logical differences diverge from reality, a generality of being that I tend to mentally reify or instantiate in the singular, say as Reality, Being, Substance, God, and so on.

I seem compelled to draw differences yet to devise a theory of everything or single universal law at the same time. I suppose that if no difference were drawn between the most general notion, sometimes referred to as the One, and the multiplicity of the things, called the Many, that I perceive from my standpoint as a unity-of-apperception in the “illusory” universe; if so-called god, to use the pagan term, were in everything and not standing apart in a singular transcendence; - no god would exist nor would there be any particular beings subsumed by General Being.

If I exist, God must exist, but I am still confused with everything. Pantheism or naturalism, no matter how much the pantheist worships God or the naturalist loves nature, is atheism or materialism.

Suffice it to say that. if I continue metaphysically long enough in an attempt to get to the bottom of being, where I am a bum begging the ultimate question, to be or not to be, I am bound to wind up weaving another web of self-contradictions that I might never untangle, and then plunge precipitously into the chaos under the corner of my temple, for reason is like an acid that will eventually eat through the foundations of my every argument. So I had better pull back from the brink of insanity.

For the sake of convenient existence, I shall tend to fall back on my standard definitions for the time being, no matter how confused I am by them, counting them as the essences of things until my witch doctors find a better dwelling than the madhouse. I must, for my own good, recognize and tolerate the absurdities, ambiguities, and ambivalences, yet gently inquire into their nature and origins, for I was born curious.

As a microcosmic part of Nature or Reality, I figure that I know much more than I think I do. But what I do not know outweighs what I do know, an ignorance that may give me cause to compose an Ode to Space or to worship Nothing one day. Why, it was my ignorance as a baby that first gave me evidence of my very existence and made of my history a series of my mistakes, or crimes against the perfection from and to which I presumptuously would progress. I am fallible inasmuch as my rationalizations will never completely agree with reality or correspond to the absolute truth, but that is not to say that I am completely at fault for my fallibility and the “original sin” of individual existence and the consciousness thereof.

The human spirit urges me on, bids me to somehow comprehend the incomprehensible that I already, unconsciously, understand, but I cannot quite put my finger on it, for whatever it is, if it really is, it forever remains intangible albeit presumably substantial. In the final analysis, I remain utterly confused.