A Glory of Incompleteness

I will confess that I believe I have a ready answer to the question with which I ended my last post:

“How then can we keep ourselves always questioning?”

The answer is found in placing the premise of “roused, readied, reaped” against the contention (perhaps seasoned with no small measure of conceit) that “thinking” in its most elevated manifestation is also “thinking” in its most unyielding manifestation.  We imagine we will discover the truth of all if we question the truth of all.

“Questioning,” however, as we can practice it, can be practiced only as a process, as much bound up with the mechanics of beginning-middle-end as any other process.  The cycles—from the life-long to the near-instantaneous—of thought are inseparable from the material and temporal elements of our existence.  We are born, live, and die, and in the course of being entertained, our thoughts similarly are born, live, and die.  The extent to which our thoughts are brought up or taken up by us and then filed away or incorporated into a larger whole—that extent can never be estimated with assurance.  If “we” are our thoughts, then our individual selves are as encumbered as our progressively-collected thought-lives: sometimes and in some manifestations handy and undeniable, and sometimes uncertainly and inexplicably wavering and fading and disappearing into what can be experienced by us as a distance.  Or sometimes inexplicably lurching again into view.

That is what it is to think, and that is what it is to have an idea of “self” inseparable from one’s individual thought-life.  That “self” is a glory of incompleteness, even as that “self” clutches to a conceit of itself as a whole.  One’s “self”—in relation to that which good conscience would reveal as a larger expression of one’s being—might be likened to the conglomeration of chromosomes that constitute the inchoate but usually persistent “half” of a dividing cell.  One moment, that conglomeration is intertwined and interacting with the “whole”, and another moment—never definable by any exact distinction of time—that “half” has congealed itself into a pole of a dividing organism.

To “question” anything, then—as being that elevated process of inspection with which we credit ourselves--is always to question that thought-basis we identify as our “selves.”  The first and most important part of questioning everything is to question every aspect of our thoughts by which we reckon ourselves to be individual “things.”