We cannot escape the burden of judgment by offloading all of our cognitive efforts onto formal rules, no matter how solid they might seem.īut reason must be exhausted – you cannot shrink from it by retreating into a childish world of delusional wish fulfillment fantasy. The most important areas of human discernment cannot be reduced to a definitive, universal list of rules and their principled exceptions. If we get past this, we can accept that judgment does, in fact have an objective basis but one that defies systematic articulation. Reason seeks and fails to provide its own justification. We can begin to see what this fundamental thing is when we attempt to give additional evidence to things which seem self-evident – proving or explaining why 2 and 2 is 4. But reason arises from something more fundamental.
It tells us that beyond its boundaries there is only superstition, impulse, and savagery. Reason is a tyrannical demi-urge that excels at coming up with reasons (!) why its claims should take priority over all others. The truth is not only in the words, but in the entire stance and experience of the person uttering them. Perhaps you have heard some neo-Advaitic platitudes or casual affirmations of life’s goodness and the transiency of evil: “It’s all one, man.” “It’s all good, man.” Imagine an ordinary person saying this to you when you were suffering extreme grief and hardship, and now imagine a saint saying the same thing in the face of torture and death.
They are not the same – one has passed through the valley, applying their full intellect, power and all the legacy of technique and tradition to a problem, and the other is making excuses to not even try. Passing through this valley is what makes the difference between the thought-terminating clichés of the lazy and unambitious and deep wisdom coming from a master – even if, superficially, they express the same sentiments. There are various Buddhist schools of thought that teach “you are already enlightened.” What then, is the point of all of this meditation? In order to appreciate how pointless it was - because you were already enlightened. Lewis wrote about the importance of prayer and good works in the context of salvation by grace alone: you must try as hard as you can in order to appreciate the futility of your efforts. You must fully and deeply learn any system in order to transcend it.Ĭ.S. This is the period of trying, and failing, to reduce any given expertise to a clearly articulable, formal and technical system. It is the developmental period anyone must pass through on the way to mastery. But this did not mean that untrained students were better than martial artists at receiving his teaching. To give an apocryphal example: Bruce Lee found that he had to teach his students to unlearn their previous martial arts training. If you attempt to short circuit this process by not performing these roles in the first place, you end up stunted and maladapted. In this Twitter thread I described a developmental pattern: you must learn to perform social roles and then unlearn those roles to become fully yourself.