my heart is bursting!

(i shall quote myself from my dialogue with prof mel.)

sometimes, no, not sometimes. always. the simplest and most obvious things always blow our mind and make us go WHOA! philosophers formulate and put forth arguments century after century in search of these things. thick, complex books with big words (sometimes too big for my baby mind) ironically are attempts to strip away the utter complexities of life in search of these most obvious and simple things. people go through mid-life crises and give up whole fortunes and empires for these (i use "these" but it could very well just be "this", as i am leaning towards believing). monks meditate on mountaintops in solitude and the harsh, cold, biting winds to seek IT (so, i chose "this" after all.) people have killed themselves because they didn't know where or how to find it. people fall in and out of relationships in a certain desperation for it. i guess you get the idea...

the strangest (and yet, not even strange at all) thing is that IT is right in our faces! why is there suffering? what is life? what is love? what is my purpose? these are questions as old as time, and as young, for time exists forever and yet doesn't exist at all. consider this, what if all these questions ultimately lead to one answer? what if this one answer was the solution to all equations? and if this is the solution to all equations, then it is EVERYWHERE! because all things are equations containing this..thing. and that's what we're doing, trying to solve equation after equation in an attempt to figure IT out. in the process, sometimes the equation gets factorised and simplified and sometimes, it gets even more complicated and it seems as though there are a billion solutions. sometimes, we think we've found an answer only to realise that it doesn't work. and sometimes, we even have to change our whole way of tackling the equation and it gets tough because we got so used to one way and we wanted so much to believe it was right and oh my gosh how would we face the world if we admit we were actually wrong from the start??

so, why do we even need to solve the equation? do we even have to? well, if you ask me, i'd tell you right now that no, we don't have to. but to me, that would mean we'd have stopped living because we were just standing outside and looking at all these equations. so, all we'd be doing is looking but when we're not engaged in them, we're as good as dead. we find the need to solve these equations because we are ultimately seeking for that thing which makes us all ONE and WHOLE. that is the solution to the seemingly incomplete equations of our own lives. and we can't solve the equation by looking at it, we have to get wholy into it and do our workings, some erasing here, some additions there, some factorising here, some calculations there, some subtraction here, some multiplication there....

so if it is right in our face, why do we have to search so hard and work so hard to find it?? i'm not so sure. but maybe it's because we don't know how to see it? or have merely forgotten how to? or is it that we have built equations after equations over those that already exist? or did we have the solution all along, from the beginning, only to forget where we placed it? you do the math.

well, i was walking past this bookshelf which i always walked past and wanted to stop at but never did while walking to my new favourite place in the SMU library to wait the rain out. only this time, i stopped. and i picked out some books and one of them was about st. augustine and his works. i was just browsing through the introduction and my eyes chanced upon these paragraphs. i didn't read more before or after it but it seems to say alot about what i'm (not very concisely) trying to say.

"two realities dwell in the center of augustine's thinking: blessedness (beatitudo) and word (verbum). it is commonly recognised in augustinian scholarship and evident in augustine's writing that blessedness is a, if not the, magisterial idea. but before blessedness is an idea, thought or a word spoken, it is the object of irrestible, universal human desire. human spiritual life is at center, for augustine, a matter of will; and will is first of all desire. and finally, the willing or desiring of blessedness is so central and all pervasive that it informs and drives every single act of willing or desiring. whatever and whenever, according to augustine, we desire, we seek blessedness. human becoming is desiring; and all desiring, wittingly or unwittingly, is the desiring of blessedness, namely of human-being. desire, then, is equivalent with human activity in time, and both are defined by their inevitable and only appropriate object; blesseedness. so, too, word is quivalent with human activity. augustine imagines every human activity, which is to say, every human willing and desiring as the uttering of the word. human becoming in all its moments and metamorphoses unfolds toward these two realities: blessedness and the word. "

and somewhere else on the same page...

"blessedness, as aristotle understands it, is inseparable from being, and being is inseparable from activity. to be blessed is simply to BE full, to be fully real in accord with one's nature. to be blessed is to be bless with and in the fullness of one's being, the fullness of one's reality. becoming represents a condition of desire, unreality, and possibility; noone is blessed within the condition of becoming. to be blessed is to be fully actualised, to be without desire in the midst of one's full human realisation. blessedness is being and being is being-in-act (energeia). thus these three question - what is human blessedness? what is human being? what is human activity? - are all one convergent central question for aristotle."

ok, then it goes on to talk about all those questions. and a whole lot of other things....well, it does lead me to another thought. that, what if we have been given the solution time and again? but perhaps, why we still don't know it is because we are not experiencing it..? and as a school of thought flows, to know something is to experience it. so, perhaps it is not just discussing the solution or formulating theories about it (though i believe they are nevertheless significant). it is fundamentally about, well, experiencing it...to BE.

well, i really have to go pee because i've been controlling like crazy in the process of typing this loooooooong (perhaps the longest i've ever posted) post so...the end. thank you for reading!

god BLESS!