DAY EIGHT

What is it about passion and fervor for anything or anyone that can lead so many otherwise intelligent people astray? I am a passionate individual. And mixed with a modest portion of intelligence covered in a creamy arrogance sauce with a yummy side dish of selfishness, I have encountered any number of dead ends on my way to the fulfillment of my desires. But then, I’m an idealistic jester whose very satirical nature side tracks any serious attempt at influencing life and culture.

But why is it that even those stoic souls who worship at the altar of rationality and fervently believe in the power of the mind to trump the emotions at each and every turn, the phlegmatic Mr. Spocks, if you will, in cold contrast to the sanguine Dr. McCoys, still fall prey to mystical associations and conjurings of the most fantastic kind?

You think not? Show me the logic of concluding from the DNA record and the organic complexity of living creatures that homo sapiens derived from completely random, undirected processes taking place over exceedingly long lengths of time. I’m not sure that a high priest of any ancient pagan religion ever had to make a greater leap of faith in order to promote the local deity du jour than is made by the modern scientist in his fervent attempt to deny the possibility that intelligence of any kind may have played a role in our genesis as a species.

And as if this uncontested road of scientific certainty isn’t enough to open a case for doubt, there is always the extreme opposite end of the intellectual spectrum, if you will, namely the loosely defined movement known only as the New Age. Occultism, Neopaganism, Astrology, Human Potentiality and Universal Truth, recycled ideas, warmed over and spiced up to be fed as fresh meat to an uneducated clientele looking for new experiences to scratch their itching ears.

Of course, one might easily assume that a healthy balance would be to position oneself somewhere in the middle of this line between “pure” rationality and “mystic” spirituality and, it may be that most of the human race finds itself somewhere along that line. But there are a good number of us, who seeing the weaknesses inherent in each of these two opposing ideas as well as, and this is more important, the potency that there is more to nature of reality than this limiting duality, have fallen, headlong as it were, onto another possibility.

For the most part, the allegedly unlimited human mind appears trapped in a dualistic world, a kind of cruel, philosophical dialectic, if you will. We speak of good versus evil, Yin and Yang, Occident versus Orient, male and female, slave and master, up and down, right and left, mind and body, hot and cold, right and wrong, black and white, capitalism versus socialism, liberal versus conservative, anarchy versus totalitarianism, ad infinitum.

And this conundrum concerning opposites is not solved by mental gymnastics like trying to explain false dilemmas (Morton’s Fork as an example) or emotional appeals that we look for the shades of ‘grey’ between the black and white or the a hybrid version of opposing ideas like ‘bi-sexual’ or the proverbial ‘middle of the road’. While these may be correct within the confines of their own usage, they just reinforce the notion that our reality seems rooted (or stuck might be a better word) in the duality of opposites.

But there is another dimension to this seeming limitation that cannot be found out by rational inquiry or mystical musings but is nonetheless as real and plain as the nose on my face.

@ 2010 Joseph Ricciardi Jr