Been thinking a lot about this subject recently, so I thought I would put some of said thoughts down here. in my bloggy little blog, to help sort them out and maybe turn them into something that makes to people who live outside my brain.

That’s most of you, right?

As with a lot of deep philosophical thoughts, this begins with martial arts movies.

One of the things stressed in martial arts movies and a lot of other media dealing with Eastern religion and other acetic disciplines is that you can only achieve these advanced levels of enlightenment and awesomeness by many, many years of gruelingly hard training, discipline, meditation, and suffering.

And a big part of me has always rebelled against this idea. What is the big deal? Why can’t you just teach me what you know now? Sure, maybe it took you decades of self-deprivation and meditation and flagellation to learn it, but that doesn’t mean I have to do the exact same thing in order to learn it. You could just tell me, and then I would know too, and without a lot of pointless suffering and enduring a life that basically sucks balls.

Or is it that you are pissed off that it took you so long to learn things which are actually really simple and obvious once you know them, and now you want other people to have to suffer like you in order to make it all seem worth it?

And it’s a nice racket, stringing people along, making them be your eager disciples and making your life way easier by just selling them on the idea that you are wise and powerful and can teach them the secrets if they just hang around and do absolutely everything you say for a long enough time.

“No, grasshopper…. you are not yet ready to learn the next big secret… ask me again next year. And make sure not to burn the rice this time, bitch. ”

By the time they figure out you don’t know anything that any moron could figure out in ten minutes, they have already invested so much of their life in your service that they are emotionally compelled to keep going.

“OK, that last bit of wisdom was crap, but I am sure the next one will be important… better not burn the rice this time… ”

And the thing is, part of me still thinks like that, but I have realized recently that the problem is that, as an intellectual, I don’t value experience nearly as much as I value knowledge (or wisdom, or understanding, or whatever you want to call it).

In fact, I am beginning to see this as a failing typical of intellectuals in general : we think that if you know the destination, the journey is a waste of time you should minimize as much as possible so you can go on the to the next thing as soon as possible.

The journey itself, and whatever experiences you might have on it, hold no value whatsoever. Even though we all know damned well that in our own lives, we have had many experiences that have changed us profoundly, some positive and some negative, we continue to think that what matters is what you learn, not what you do, and if you could have learned the same thing faster, that would have been better.

The metaphor that comes to mind to explain this folly : A man takes a long journey from his village to the big city, and as he takes his first step into the city, he exclaims “What a fool I have been! Obviously, I should have taken this step first, and saved myself the rest of the trip!”

Oh well, next time you’ll know, right?

Everything we do, even if we do nothing, changes us. The river never stops flowing and carves new channels, or makes the old ones deeper.

And therefore, some changes in us can only be wrought by experiencing certain things. You can’t skip the middle simply because you know the ending. It is an experience that will change you, not simply an insight or a technique.

You have to actually change who you are and not just what you know.

And to an intellectual (who probably thinks of themselves as open-minded and freethinking) change of self is the most frightening kind of change and is to be blindly and ferociously avoided at all costs.

And so we end up going around and around in the same big circles over and over again, all the while thinking we are finding something new.

Big brains do not solve all problems.

Sometimes, you have to let things happen to you instead.