An Elusive Completeness

I sat in silence, alone in the Meeting House, for a long time. I let my mind wander over whatever it chose. Mostly I thought about why I like to sit quietly and let my mind wander. I realized then that there is an inner art of the mind. It cannot be controlled, it cannot be directly spoken, but it is there. Through silence it is drawn from its slumber and given to thought. Think directly of it and you will loose it. Let it act freely, and it remains. It fulfilled whatever it crossed, and in its tracks left everything complete. The peacefulness, and the feeling of pure purposelessness, to a degree that the lack of intention became my very intent, was a great, relaxing feeling. I felt I had found something that I had lost by thinking too hard.

Composition of the World

Every description that can be made about the world relies on one important aspect of the world of our observation: patterns that hold in a fraction usually extend to the whole. For example, if I am to say that each person has two eyes, it is because I have seen several people each with two eyes, and none without. I have not seen every person, or even close to it. When I make the statement, it is thus the statement of a generalized rule about the world.

When the senses are given information from the world, it occurs as arbitrary, isolated details that compose observation. For information to be obtained about the world, other than the sensory details themselves, it is necessary to find a consistant pattern in the sensory input, and then form some idea of how it would generalize to the abstract concept of the world. Thus every truth that may be stated is a well generalized pattern, and these patterns not only form the basis of knowledge, they are all knowledge.

Even the most elementary ideas that may be understood and communicated will be in the form of these patterns. It is true that there must be initial truth that relates the senses to the entity of their interpretation, but the nature of that intitial truth could only be realized through a pattern of the world. The pure transcendental world, despite its necessary existence, is beyond our reach.