These are a few notes jotted down during my trip to Oregon:
We are taught to see the world in terms of what it isn’t. This is why traffic bothers us: because we see our destination invisibly laid over the current scene, and the difference as a gnawing lack. We evaluate events compared to what they might have been. We live one life in the body, and countless possible lives-that-aren’t in the mind. Looking at things in terms of their negative – awareness by contrast – I stop seeing what is, which cannot be understood in terms of what isn’t. Could I learn a language, studying the words it doesn’t contain?
People in a silent room seem to unconsciously hear the music that’s not playing, the sounds they aren’t hearing. The omission of sound is what troubles them. If they listened to the silence, what could be wrong with it?
Thinking about what is not cannot inform me about awareness, since the negative of awareness is exactly that of which I cannot be aware. If the negative of my being cannot inform me about being, how can the negative of life inform me about life?
Perhaps our awareness is the present, is reality, is God as manifest. What reason do I have, other than my education, to separate them? Wherever one is, there’s always the other. Could I be aware without that of which I’m aware? Can that of which I’m aware exist without my awareness of it? If they are inextricably linked, perhaps they are the same thing.
When I think I know something, I stop looking at it. It’s ignorance, in which a person wants to learn, that causes us to look. Thus, ignorance is more beneficial to awareness than knowledge. Knowledge is useful for increasing the scope of our curiosity, granting us access to a greater and more profound ignorance, increasing our thirst to know. But if it remove our sense of ignorance, knowledge defeats itself. Awareness swims in the unknown, moving from intrigue to intrigue; it dies without breath on the shores of what is certain.