epistemolo-gee

I'm having a tough time these days "knowing" anything. For one, the older I get the more I get confused between my dreams, reality, and imagination. Many's the time I've had to stop myself and say, "no. no. that never happened. and dancing, juggling hyenas don't even exist."

Furthermore, the more I try to focus my mind on understanding some point or another, the more I realize that the point is only part of a line, which is part of a plane, which is part of every other plane. Each question leads to every other question, and each time a question begins to send out investigatory tendrils I can be assured that they'll keep on going forever until I come to a point where I'm face to face with God, which forces me to think about faith. I find it difficult to paint a duck and decide simultaneously to believe in the revealed character of God (or not, since every sin is a decision of unbelief), so I'm forced to shut myself up and just "BE".

To make just one point, the artist in me has to perform an act of willful blindness - to ignore the rabbit trails and say, "this question, here and now, is the only question that's ever mattered". I have to rigorously exercize my mind to construct an iron-clad wall of will over and against the enticing doors to exploration. This amounts to an "arrogance of idea", in which I stop in a specific state of being and convince myself that all the other states hounding around looking for a chink in the armor are inferior. Often I don't care to do so, and my mind expands and expands out into infinity until there's nowhere else to go and I have to kick a wall or pet a dog and hopefully I don't get the two confused.