Ends and Purpose

Division rears its head at every turn. How do we distinguish without dividing?

There is a difference. Quality cannot be perceived without some way of making distinctions. It's what we do with these perceptions that either clarify our relation with what-is or lead us to divide our selves and reduce everything to a set of binaries.

Distinction is the way perception works. We distinguish degrees of difference, visually, or by means of any of our senses. This is simply how creatures work. The rub comes with what we do with distinctions once we find them.

The notion of rest keeps showing up in regard to what happens next. There is a strong habit of thinking that seeks rest. Rest in the sense of a position we can take? Fall into? Assume? A position that will guard us from care.

It appears that this desire for rest is a result of the thrashing we put our organisms through. It differs from biological recovery: The kind of physical rest a body needs when it has been challenged. A period during which biological plasticity generates and regenerates tissue that has been damaged. Rebuilds stores and re-balances levels of hormones and nutrients. The work of biological homeostasis.

This other rest is not like a need for sleep.

It is a form of seeking salvation. It acts out a deep suspicion that we cannot cope with what we find our selves immersed in. It stems from the fatigue brought about by our suffering.

This brings us to one of the distinctions that appears between suffering and misery. The body responds to misery. Suffering is the non-Proprioceptive reactions we pile-on top of whatever misery is our lot. Indeed we use it to actively poison whatever well-being we might otherwise experience.

This hints at a driver: Division and suffering stem from a refusal to accept wholeness.

Disintegration is not a natural state. We are born integrated; but un-formed. Our conditioning leads us to seek division and seeking form we disintegrate.

We tire. Weary we find no consolation. From within our disintegration we can think of nothing but relief, finding solace. We seek it in salvation. We seek it in rest.

Salvation, any rejection of responding to what-is, only further divides us from everything and acts to increase our disintegration. It is a bind not a way out.

Blinded by our fatigue we seek an end. Conflating ends with purpose we add to our difficulties a dangerous un-mooring from any possibility of engagement. Instead of gaining traction we grease the skids….

Purpose is misconstrued when we consider purpose to be just another end.

The real work ahead is in sorting this out, teasing out the hints that lead to a non-ideological and non-nihilistic view of purpose. We are used to these binaries hemming us in. Either we see purpose as an end to achieve an ideological goal or, seeing through this, we seek to toss-out any possibility of meaning and purpose with a nihilistic reaction.

Quality points at another alternative. Meaning can be found within an active integration of what is broken. In this engagement with what-is we act out of a different sense of purpose.