The way

On gnostic, intuitive, living

We are so use to seeing life through concepts, we don’t feel quite right trying to live without a conceptual handle on things.

It’s not enough to just live, we have to think about living too. The ego has to assure itself that this way is the right way.

It has to assure itself that it is safe, secure, on the right path and so on.

It does this by relying on its conceptual grasp of life. If I have a sure enough conceptual understanding of myself, other people, and the way the world works, then I can piece together the puzzle of life and come up with a solution.

Of course, to do this, the mind breaks up all of life into separate little puzzle pieces, and this is duality (or multi-polarity).

Every moment of waking life becomes filtered through that prism of concepts, that map of reality.

One of my favourite Alan Watts quotes speaks to this:

“Not content with tasting the food, I am also trying to taste my tongue. Not content with feeling happy, I want to feel myself feeling happy - so as to be sure not to miss anything.”

We can’t just taste the food - we have to conceptualise the experience as “I am here, tasting the food”. We can’t just be happy - we have to think “I am happy, it must be because of reasons X, Y or Z. I’ll make sure my life has more of X, Y or Z in the future.”

But the mystical life doesn’t really consist of that kind of knowing.

Photo by Matt Foxx on Unsplash