Attending to Dust-Clouds

by Coe Douglas on June 6, 2009

There is a great quote by William James at the beginning of Dark Lore, Volume 1 that reads,

Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to.

As I finish up with Entangled Minds by Dean Radin and launch into In Search of the Miraculous by P.D. Ouspensky, I can’t help but feel the timeliness of this statement as it bears down on me.

There is so much we don’t, can’t and won’t understand, not in lifetimes. These questions aren’t answered by religions, or science or philosophers but can only be answered I believe from within. To quote Swami Vivekananda,

The goal of mankind is knowledge … Now this knowledge is inherent in man. No knowledge comes from outside: it is all inside. What we say a man ‘knows’, should, in strict psychological language, be what he ‘discovers’ or ‘unveils’; what man ‘learns’ is really what he discovers by taking the cover off his own soul, which is a mine of infinite knowledge.

In other words, knowledge, knowing, learning is really a form of remembering.

This is about gnosis, knowledge of self and deep understanding that transcends books. The most important things we can learn, we already posses if we could all only remember where we left them.

Spread the Words:
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Current
  • FriendFeed
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • email

Leave a Comment

Previous post:

Next post: