It
can be difficult to accept oneself saying "I don't know". At any age.
Especially for me when I was a young man. I'd pretend to have some knowledge of
the artist mentioned, the singer's name overheard, the place name on the global
map. "Ah, Oman!" I might've wisely acquiesced, knowingly, as if the
speaker and I were in an esoteric accord. For I did not then think much of the
distinction between knowledge and wisdom. I was not yet in a matured certainty
between fact and intuition. And I certainly was then determined to find my
wealth in Knowledge, the gleaning thereof, the accretion thereof, the banking
and trading and commerce thereof. After all, knowledge was power. And to risk
not to be au fait with the pop culture, the literati, the opera goers and the
politicians and the intellectual purveyors was to be, well, 'less than'. After
all, many a soul has been withered by others in the know.Ha! Even so, just this year I bought a book, ‘Know it All’.
My
long-time friend sits on the bench beside me in the autumn sun. Ian wears my
old friend Vic Peter's borrowed blue cap. They knew each other way back, in
another lifetime, before I met either of them. Vic gave that blue cap to me as he and
I set off in our power-chairs for our last vista over Calgary's Glenmore
Reservoir, a few months before he died. But now, many years later, it is Ian who sits
beside me on a bench overlooking the sun-baked Willow Beach. And much of our
conversation is about death and dying, our comfort with its inevitability, and I introduce good old reincarnation too: "Ever been here
in lifetimes before?"
"I
don't know," Ian responds. "And at my age I'm comfortable with
that."
"Yes,
neither of us identify with reincarnation; we have no direct and intuitive
recall to some other lifetime; we have no certainty of its existence for
ourselves; we have no authentic and inviolable connection. Perhaps, like many
books by Dolores Cannon suggests, we are survivors of The First Wave! Ha! If
true, then alien souls have been sent in three waves to integrate earth-beings
with compassion and a caring sense of a need for integration, for those earthlings in
the cycles of reincarnation have missed the mark, and without compunction are
destined to blow up earth and seriously affect the universe. In fact, as Steven
Hawkins has of late said, given our Higgs Bosun experiments with the God
Particle we are inevitably about "to destroy the universe!"
Ian smiles, "And
how can one say for sure that Dolores Cannon is right? Or for that matter,
Hawkins too?"
"I
don't know. Ha! And..." I beam at him, "I'm comfortable with that."
Before
us here and there on the beach are bikini-bathers, dog-walkers, children
building sand-castles. My latest painting, Intercellular Connection, comes to
mind. The beach is pock-marked in either direction with a hundred hours of
footsteps, cellular and molecular, and the sea glitters away and toward us in a
billion little bowls filled with light. Even the distant mountains on the
horizon are enmeshed in a fog that re-assimilates their solidity into the
landscape. It all is one.
I
was waylaid today as I made my way downtown to my Friday reflections perch
above the compass in The Bay. Just outside at the entrance lay a near-naked
lady in the sunlight on the pavement, as if on a giant's plate with its huge
cutlery to either side, related vegetables and sauce strewn about and on her,
and a sign saying "Relate to the Plate!"
To
be vegetarian or not? To be a tobacco user, or not? To be a democrat or a
republican? A conservative or a liberal? A believer or a non? To know or not to
know?... But to be comfortable?
We
live with a certain passion that combines knowledge and wisdom. For the rest? I
don't know, OK?
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