The central issue, as I understood it, related to the claim being made that thinking is mankind’s salvation, that it leads to insight, love, emptiness, etc, and that it can take place without a content of memory. Holding hands and staring into people’s eyes is something you have introduced.
When I said ‘let’s agree to disagree’ I was merely being polite.
That’s the worst thing in the world to be. It means you have polished and made smooth what really is there underneath, which is anger or fear, loneliness, self-disgust, powerlessness, inadequacy. Being polite is then as much use as polishing a turd, to use a vulgar expression. The smell remains, which is the smell of thought.
You won’t show your real feelings because you think the world will condemn you for them. Probably it will; the world is just as stupid as you. If you were here anonymously, as I am, it wouldn’t matter and things would take a different course. But you want to protect at all costs the image you have of ‘James’. Either way you are lost, whether you are here anonymously or not, because you still have to live in the world as ‘James’. No-one cares about ‘James’, so I don’t know why you do.
Only when you stop caring about ‘James’ does real anonymity come into being, the anonymity that K talks about. Thinking is anonymous and thought is not. Be anonymous and you will understand in an instant all that I am talking about; and there will never again be any problem between us or between you and another that your thinking cannot solve. You have never known what it is to think without thought and therefore you turn to thought to help you make sense of it. Don’t turn to thought and you have made sense of it.
Let’s finish with him, our old friend:
Neither have you Anonymous, because the word ‘thinking’ implies a content of thought. What you are doing on this thread is an expression of your thinking. Clearly you think that you know what it means to love, that you have insight, that you have no motives, that you are humble, etc. All these things you have written are - at least in part - the product of your thinking. That thinking may be correct, maybe mistaken, maybe absurd, maybe truthful - it is your own thinking which you then share with another person. You can call it the putting into words of your own observations if you like; but in the very doing of it, it becomes thought. And your observations maybe pervaded with bias. Which is why all thinking is to be doubted - as well as any conclusions arising out of observation (because it may be tainted with background thought).
I really don’t know.
I have given you a heart but you get a sneaky virtual hug too! (No more words; we give K the last word.)
Could unrequited love be the source of the rage?
Sometimes with One I Love
By Walt Whitman
Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturn’d love,
But now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one way or another
(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d,
Yet out of that I have written these songs).
Thinking is tool. Use it .