authenticity
Docta Ignorancia
January 27, 2020
“Deep acceptance of ultimate mystery is ironically the best way to keep the mind and heart spaces always open and always growing.”
Fr. Richard Rohr, Center for Action & Contemplation
“We do need enough knowing to be able to hold our ground. We need a container and structure in which we can safely acknowledge that we do know a bit, in fact just enough to hold us until we are ready for a further knowing. In the meantime, we can happily exist in what some have called docta ignorantia or “learned ignorance.” Such people tend to be very happy and they also make a lot of other people happy.
A few years ago, a man from Colorado came to visit me. He said, “Richard, when you were still in Cincinnati, I gave you a dilemma that I was struggling with; and you told me something that has been my mantra for 30 years. You said to me, ‘You know, you don’t really need to know. It’s okay not to know.’”
‘Grace has released all the deepest energies of our spirit and assists us to climb to new and unsuspected heights. Nevertheless, our own faculties soon reach their limit. The intelligence can climb no higher into the sky. There is point where the mind bows down its fiery trajectory as if to acknowledge its limitations and proclaim the infinite supremacy of the unattainable…’
Love flings out a hundred burning stars, acts of all kinds, expressing everything that is best in (wo)man’s spirit, and the soul spends itself in drifting fires that glorify the name of God…Gaia…while they fall earthward and die away in the night wind!’
-Thomas Merton
Perhaps ‘love’ is beyond definition here, more the Tao of existence, in that defining it beyond all there is, is reducing it to knowing, rather than acknowledging we do not know…only ‘enough knowing.’ “You know, we really don’t need to know.” .d
Mark Nepo:
“When we bare our inwardness fully, exposing our strengths and frailties alike, we discover a kinship in all living things, and from this kinship a kindness moves through us and between us. The mystery is that being authentic is the only thing that reveals to us our kinship with life.”
I crave authenticity. There is so little.
…unfolding what is within.
April 29, 2018
The physical structure of the universe is love.
—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955)
Wrapped within young leaves: the sound of water.
—Soseki
”Our gift already unfolded. Embedded in the seed is the blossom. embedded in the womb is the child fully grown. Embedded in the impulse to care is the peace of love realized. Embedded in the edge of risk and fear is the authenticity that makes life worth living.
For as dust owes its path to wind, we, as human beings, are asked to acknowledge that something larger encircles us and prompts us to unfold.
There is a gravity of spirit that pulls the essence of who we are into being. Our job, like all our sister creatures, is to find the abundance of air and water and light, and to unfold what is already within us.”
-Mark Nepo
Pro-wrestling universe.
October 29, 2016
“…authenticity is a foreign concept in this world.”
And what lesson can we learn from politics importing pro wrestling’s mindset? Once you see it, you can’t unsee the connection. Worth noting that one of the key narratives of pro wrestling is the fake within the fake–someone is always claiming that the outcome is rigged. (In wrestling, of course, it is rigged. And so is the complaining.)
Pro wrestling works as a play and a medium because the people who are part of it realize that it’s fake.
It turns out that modern media is a perfect match for the pro-wrestling approach.
You can put on a show, with your own media, as often as you like. And that show is, to many, remarkable, and so it spreads.
And there lies the danger, the opportunity for pro-wrestling thinking to corrupt our society: When the fans, or worse, the participants, don’t realize that it’s fake.
In real life, the laws of physics actually work. In real life, blood feuds rarely end well. In real life, accepting the ref’s decisions is the only way to have civilization…
The filter bubble creates an echo chamber, and reality stars are pushed to be more like cartoonish pro wrestlers and less like responsible human beings. If it bleeds, it leads.
You probably work with people who are living in their own pro wrestling universe. These are people who are so in love with their version of reality and their goals that they view the real world as an affront, an intrusion on the way they insist things turn out.
Reality remains our common ground, the best one we have to work with.
-Seth Godin
