What we know is so little of all that can be known, and everyday we invent more to learn.1 So we will always be bewildered,2 ignorant. Then we derive more meaning, not just from the pieces, but the way they are combined. Synergy3 multiplies their meaning beyond easy understanding. Any understanding we do get, any model we make is limited by our experience.4 Confounding complexity building on complexity, as life and mind evolve the Earth.5 Patterns building on patterns, unpredictably and incessantly. New domains of persisting organization compounding on old.6 All emergent from a few, simple, principles. The basic truths of existence, difference, pattern. The many permutations of the pattern ensuring our context remains beyond comprehension.7 In almost all situations, we are ignorant of most of the effects of our actions. So often the best action is no action. Embracing ignorance,8 and acknowledging our inability to follow all the chains of effect, you feel responsibility lifted. The complexity that so vexes9 us, sets us free. Let go of needing to know10 and gain the freedom to just be, duties negated in the choice to let the pattern work its way.11
1 “The mind of man is this world’s true dimension / and knowledge is the measure of mind. / As the mind in her vast comprehension / contains more worlds than all the world can find, / so knowledge doth extend / far more than all the minds of men can comprehend.” - Fulke Greville
2 “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” - “The Faqir and the Treasure”, Rumi
3 “101.01 Synergy means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately.” - Synergetics, Buckminster Fuller
4 “Existence is larger than any model that is not itself the exact size of existence (which has no size…)” - Nature's God, Robert Anton Wilson
5 Life on earth is possible because energy is continuously added to the system by the sun.
6 “What you see, I think is the morphogenetic field. The invisible world that holds everything together. Not the net of matter and light, but the net of casuistry — of intentionality, of caring, of hope, of dream — of thought.” - “Light at the End of History”, Terence McKenna
7 Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimensions, A Square
8 “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.” - Confucius
9 “Worry is a misuse of the imagination.” - “Believe”, Dan Zadra
10 “Let it Go”, Gaelynn Lea
11 Wu wei (non-doing) is an important concept in Taoism that means behaving in a completely natural, uncontrived way.
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