The prison's in my mind, or the prison IS my mind? If the prison's in my my mind, the prison is an idea--but what idea could hold me in a prison? Certainly, the idea that I'm in a prison would itself be imprisoning. Yet, couldn't we be just as imprisoned in an idea that we were liberated from prison, or not in a prison, if it turns out we actually were? I'd even go so far as to say the idea of freedom itself could be precisely what does the imprisoning.
Lets explore the hidden metaphor here: the idea that the mind is like a box that has ideas inside it. Ideas, then, would be just mental things that are placed in the box. But just now we said that the idea of the mind as a box is just that--an idea. that is to say, the box itself shows up inside itself, as a finite content within a finite extent--except that, as it happens, this content is coextensive in size with that which contains it. Or, it contains itself.
We've even heard, in our highest philosophy, of phenomena as the "open region where things show up." This open region does not itself ever show up, and any attempt to force it into showing is substituting something else--something finite--with that which we wish to explore. And yet we've also said that the idea of freedom could precisely be what contains us; it may itself be an example of substituting a finite idea with the infinite, within which that idea appears. For it seems to me that, fundamentally, we deal with finite things even when we speak of the infinite. Our mind is organized spatially, and the great phenomenologists and logicians have delved into all of the rules and boundaries of this implicit space. But the infinite is not of thought, or boundaries, but of feeling. It is just love.
The prison's in my mind, or the prison IS my mind? If the prison's in my my mind, the prison is an idea--but what idea could hold me in a prison? Certainly, the idea that I'm in a prison would itself be imprisoning. Yet, couldn't we be just as imprisoned in an idea that we were liberated from prison, or not in a prison, if it turns out we actually were? I'd even go so far as to say the idea of freedom itself could be precisely what does the imprisoning.
ReplyDeleteLets explore the hidden metaphor here: the idea that the mind is like a box that has ideas inside it. Ideas, then, would be just mental things that are placed in the box. But just now we said that the idea of the mind as a box is just that--an idea. that is to say, the box itself shows up inside itself, as a finite content within a finite extent--except that, as it happens, this content is coextensive in size with that which contains it. Or, it contains itself.
We've even heard, in our highest philosophy, of phenomena as the "open region where things show up." This open region does not itself ever show up, and any attempt to force it into showing is substituting something else--something finite--with that which we wish to explore. And yet we've also said that the idea of freedom could precisely be what contains us; it may itself be an example of substituting a finite idea with the infinite, within which that idea appears. For it seems to me that, fundamentally, we deal with finite things even when we speak of the infinite. Our mind is organized spatially, and the great phenomenologists and logicians have delved into all of the rules and boundaries of this implicit space. But the infinite is not of thought, or boundaries, but of feeling. It is just love.
I would have said that
ReplyDeletebut it wouldn't fit in the
form of a haiku.