You might find yourself, sooner or later, sitting in a bathtub, the limpid blue up to your shoulders and that damned fluorescent light shining above you, and look around and see the thinness of the light about you. And in the thinness of that light might come a recollection, a recollection that has been prodding, sometimes gently, at the back of your skull or somewhere among your ribs or the muscles surrounding the colon. It will inform you, with dazzling surety, that every category, accumulated piece of knowledge, shelter of syllogism, or A to B is worth essentially very little—nothing, in fact, or almost nothing, actually.
You have been reflecting, say, on the God of the philosophers and angrily refuting arguments in your head involving circular dominoes logically and so absurdly supposed to exist before their own existence and when you arrive at the pristine clarity of the certainty of the noncontingent, that glorious principle founding the possibility of all contingent being, you are hit with the realization that, really, this principle is empty, absolutely empty, because you know nothing at all about this principle except there is, must be, some such principle, but what it is or how to approach it is shrouded in an all-encasing mist.
Well, you might mutter things like “the more you understand the less you understand” and actually mean them instead of just wanting to sound smart or humble, or laugh at whatever philosopher said the world was his because he understood it. You would look about and have the sense that you could peer straight down into the deepest spheres of being, down straight into those Kabbalistic depths, and in seeing the beautiful baroque structure and apparent endlessness of it feel completely at a loss for just what the hell the world actually is. You might be half way up Jacob’s ladder and stop in panic because you do not know nor have ever known just what this ladder is or where it comes from or where it is going, or what you are or where you came from or where you are going, and feel as if all the light around is a thin membrane that might explode any second with rushing water, incredibly deep and dark but for foam and luminous colors you have never seen. You might actually look and swear that you can see the walls of this membrane stretching, and little cracks appearing, something totally ineffable because totally incomprehensible beginning to leak, yes actually leak and bubble, through.
You are afraid the whole sensible world might collapse into a confusion of impressions, of haunting sounds and those unknowns colors, which are the same colors that you’ve always seen but that you’ve never seen at all because you didn’t have the eyes to see them, not really. You’ll think all your concepts, all your studying, perhaps your entire worldview were always mostly a bulwark against this flood that you feel just on the other side of this really very thin membrane but that they’ve failed you by an intrinsic flaw, namely, that if one takes them seriously and tries to see what the most exalted are pointing at, if one doesn’t just rest content with the concepts but actually tries to encounter the reality they are supposed to describe, then one’s concepts and worldview might reveal their inadequacy and the whole damn picture begin to swarm with new, hardly comfortable entities much more alive and unpredictable than mere concepts or assumptions.
You’ll think that perhaps this is the beginning of wisdom since, though perhaps you aren’t in the moment, if you let your mind dwell on that leaking membrane long enough, you certainly would be shaking with fear—fear of this mystery so vertiginously deep. And whatever “God” means, it has something to do with these heights, so you are sure this is a kind of fear of God and you cannot tell if you’re on the top of some horrifyingly massive pillar or at the bottom of the ocean catching sight of a distant sun ray.
Whatever the case, you have things to do and really ought to get to bed at a reasonable hour, and that damned fluorescent light is making everything look grotesque and so really it would be better just to get to bed, if you can sleep and, mercifully, you find that you can.
This was beautiful and describes exactly how I often feel. Thank you for this wonderful meditation.