The water felt good. The city looked beautiful with the blazing orange sun dropping behind it, silhouetting the high rises. Families were still out playing in the water and lying about on the sand.
The water itself was magnificent. And I'm just talking about the crashing waves that were right in front of us. The waves would crash rhythmically, producing swirling patterns of bubbles that flowed in atop the rippling surface, chaotic bubble clusters that were birthed with the crashing water. Beneath the surface of the crashing waves, the disturbed sand beneath erupted into clouds that came in with the tide and then were sucked back out within seconds. As the water fell back, the eroding sand slid down the shore in shimmering arrow-like patterns. An entire universe ebbing and flowing at our feet. Gorgeous.
There were great truths expressed in those waves that I could only think about intuitively. One can think about the scientific principles behind the crashing waves and the eroding sand but what does it all really mean at its core? Its curious to think about how compartmentalized our modern knowledge systems are. Spiritual masters reside in their spheres, philosophers in theirs, scientists in theirs, all talking of the same things with completely different sets of languages and concepts. Though there is always traffic between the spheres. Those avenues need to be broadened. More communication.
Of course, such philosophical issues and practical questions have been explored by plenty of thinkers for a long time. Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" explores just these sorts of issues (I haven't read it yet myself, just read about it). His metaphysics of Quality seeks to account for Western rationalism's great weakness: a relentless and blind reductionism that only contributes to further and further physical and intellectual divisions, by combining with it lessons derived from Eastern philosophy's tendency to emphasize one-ness and whole-ness and the associated Zen mindset that goes with that. F. S. C. Northrop has pursued similar lines. It is interesting that the greater mass of Western thought emphasizes reduction and division while the greater mass of Eastern thought emphasizes the interconnected nature of reality and oneness. Though of course those respective bodies of thought are by no means distinct entities: they've influenced each other and trafficked in each others' ideas for centuries.
It is a shame none of us as cultures have learned from the accumulated knowledge (well at least the dominant, mainstream cultures). We end up with these varying forms of hierarchies of domination in which rationalism is compartmentalized and instrumentalized, thus rendered politically harmless, and spiritualism either becomes absorbed into the economic/state apparatus (as we see with the sick spectacle of the Christian Imperialism of the US) or compartmentalized itself and eventually ossified into its own hierarchical institutions embedded into greater society, where it also becomes politically harmless. How to overcome this state of affairs? More in a bit.
On the walk back, some wonderful graffiti. I've been coming across a lot of really good graffiti lately that is less a territorial marking and more a meaningful plea of some type:
Good signs. Less tribalism. More general human concern. The really curious thing about this particular scrawling is that slavery is misspelled as "slalerery" which is then crossed out. A mistake? Possibly. If so the author accidentally gave us a pleasant gift. But I doubt it was a mistake. Slavery is wildly misspelled. Everyone knows "slavery". And "emancipate" is probably tougher to spell anyways. Perhaps this message is trying to say something about illiteracy? Our schools are doing an increasingly poor job at educating children in even the basics, especially poor schools populated by minorities, which itself can be traced back to funding and institutional racism, on top of the fact that our entire public sector, including our schools, is being economically eviscerated to account for war spending, lesser land taxes and capital taxes which mainly affect the rich, corporate subsidies, bank usury, and whatever oligarchic rot you can think of.
Illiteracy is incredibly intellectually crippling too. Illiteracy is widely ridiculed in an advanced society and so if you are trying to say something but can't properly do so, chances are you won't be taken seriously, which itself contributes to serious psychological complexes and problems with self-confidence. Such a state necessarily constitutes mental slavery, in many different ways. It is a great injustice.
But lets dig in to the core meaning of the message itself, word-play and hidden messages aside. This particular message is reminiscent of Bob Marley's plea to "emancipate yourselves from mental slavery" in his Redemption Song, a plea that seems to have come from Marcus Garvey: "We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind. Mind is your only ruler, sovereign. The man who is not able to develop and use his mind is bound to be the slave of the other man who uses his mind ..."
What does it mean to emancipate yourself from mental slavery? It is quite an analogy. Where is the master? Where is the slave? Garvey mentions that one can be the slave of another that uses his mind, but there is always more to it than that. I didn't read Garvey's work but I imagine he understood this too.
One carries a master in one's own mind, namely the values of dominant culture, which is in turn enforced by probably what we crudely call the super ego. Emancipation takes much effort, care and time. Perhaps it is a process that never ends.
Such an endeavor requires a post of its own.
