The Infinite (EN#17)
Our brain plays tricks on us. At the end of last week, a friend asked me about my interest in the Infinite. My first reaction? Bof, do I have an opinion on this? But that was without counting on these many neurons resting on our shoulders. Sunday morning, I’m putting away the dishes (it’s very relaxing — we think we don’t think), and boom, coming out of the blue, the first sentence of the next paragraph comes to my mind. I run to my computer; because in these moments we only have a few minutes before it escapes us, maybe forever. There you go, it was gone. Since it was Sunday, a rare day when I made no obligations to myself, once the first sentence was written, it just couldn’t stop. It gave the following.
The Infinite is all that requires going beyond our immediate experience, but the problem is that one cannot imagine it from outside this same experience.
How to get out of it within the limits imposed by the immanence of its nature?
No longer be the puppet of his ego? Noble enterprise if there is one, but relentlessly evanescent, its rare achievement so easily erasing the trace.
Fleeing fear, attacking the source of irritation, panicking at the idea of being alone, aspiring to contact, even to fusion, wanting to enlarge one’s horizon and control one’s destiny while consolidating one’s existence in the eyes of the other are vectors of experience, so powerfully mobilizing the precious and limited space of our conscious attention, so that there is so little left for the Infinite.
Of course, the fear of death can push us to its portal, aspiring to slip into it to escape our limits. Sermons and rituals promise us so, but they remain just as stuck in experience. Even the revolt against this state of affairs fails to detach itself from it.
However, precisely, we often have the feeling that there is this Infinite. From the outer reaches of the Universe to within ourselves, don’t we intuitively feel that something is beyond us?
The answers that we can grasp would go through mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, ethology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, meditation … at least that’s what our experience can offer us. Could the consciousness of this experience be part of this Whole, a manifestation of this energy precisely making existence possible? But can it apprehend this Whole? We have no way of knowing for sure (at least nothing that would completely reassure our left hemisphere). Can our aspiration to Infinity serve as little as a window opening onto its presence (that makes it more right hemisphere)? In any case, and ultimately, it is the only thing that we finally have, a presence, a presence in our experience apprehending or aspiring to the Infinite.
pcousineau 