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Something
has been lost … or is at risk now (as always). People feel it, but have
difficulty
locating
the cause or nature of the problem. I sometimes think of this as
involving a
kind of anemia. “We are undernourished, even starved.” But for, or of,
what?
This is
WoK’s main question, and it’s not an easy one to answer, because the
elusiveness of the problem itself derives from our anemic condition.
Often we
are too depleted to even notice this condition … or to recognize “food.”
One
possible diagnosis is that we are starved for direct experience of
ourselves
and life, of any real connection to things. And this is very roughly
the kind
of answer WoK would like to offer. So although it’s hard to determine in
what we are deficient, we could tentatively say we suffer from an
“existential anemia.” But this diagnosis, like any other we could
supply from
our available set of categories and concepts, only captures part of the
problem, and offers some clarity at the price of also misdirecting us
or
perhaps just feeding our complacency.
The
subject that is really at issue does not have adequate name in any
language. It’s
not studied by any science or in any college curriculum, and yet it
bears on
many topics that are. Of course, everyone will accept that our
contemporary
views of
ourselves and of reality are not complete, and probably never will be.
But a
lack of clarity with respect to this “anemia” is both the cause and the
result
of many difficulties we encounter, on both personal and theoretical
levels. It
really can and should be addressed now, and on an on-going basis.
What
would it even mean to address this? Part of the answer is to start by
respecting the problem more—to acknowledge and stay with it for a
while, with
no rush to a “labeling” (and one-sided) type of judgment. Sensitization
to our
anemic state provides a good start towards recovering sensibilities
that are
needed to see it more clearly. This marshals a rich mix of human
concerns,
intuitions and types of understanding, and fosters more explicit
“seeing” and
new capacities to see.
More
awareness can help us recognize a wide and apparently diverse range of
issues
and problems, some personal, some theoretical (even bearing on the most
fundamental of intellectual, ethical, aesthetic and scientific
questions and
perspectives), as being related to the vague malaise with which we
started.
Such awareness can also help us assess traditional “remedies”—methods
of
cultivating awareness—and guide in the shaping of our society’s own
contemporary approaches to being more awake. Perhaps it will even yield
glimpses of the future (both of humanity or humaneness, and of
science). These
matters, taken together as an inseparable whole, constitute the subject
of WoK.
Steven, 4/8/06.