Young pups and old sages
When I was young and reading endless science fiction, I would have never used the term ‘exploring the unknown.’ Yet, like Picard, Kirk and Verne, there I was.
Some years later I found myself decades deep in the martial arts. By then I had realized that there is far more unknown than known. Which is, in my opinion, something that makes many of us squeamish and a bit disconcerted that we are not in nearly as much control as we prefer to hope or believe. Just ask all those Doers and Achievers.
Anyway, it seemed to me that it might make sense for us to use the American frontiersman as a bit of a role model, perhaps setting a goal to become pathfinders, trailblazers, trappers or even guides in the vast wilderness.
Although when I looked around, it seemed there were plenty who wanted to be guides. But maybe they were a little too quick to ‘ volunteer’ into those positions, only capable of guiding into the closer or more convenient boundaries of the great wildernesses. And there, nearby, sat all those wilderness souvenir stores, wanting to sell charms and oils, pendulums and DVDs, astrological charts and seminars.
In a sense, it seemed like the heavenly realms were being commercialized, seen as an opportunity for the hungry profiteers, and people with too-white teeth who wear purple or own many mansions.
Meanwhile, the more diligent among us tend to spurn most of that, and instead dive into walks in nature, or study philosophy, comparative religion, consciousness or perhaps quantum physics. All in a sincere attempt to somehow map that which seemingly can’t be mapped.
A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. — -Ralph Waldo Emerson
