Wondering about relationships to infinity…

“A conclusion is where one gets tired of thinking” — I believe a friend of mine once said. In a certain sense, it seems that life is a continuous process of surrender. There are certainly beautiful and interesting questions to be asked surrounding the subject of motivation. Towards what are we motivated, and in that, where along the way do we surrender? There are obviously little motivations towards which we achieve full span before surrender… take the ring of the ice cream bell for instance, many a time have I enjoyed a delicious fudge sickle while walking away from that truck satisfied….

But here I find myself led again towards my initial inquiry, “the motivation” for this article; what are the motivations beneath my motivations, and upon these motivations, what motivations ride?

It is as if, by the sheer act of looking, more is created. At a certain point, I decide that that is enough, and move onto another line of looking (inquiry). That decision is a kind of surrender to the partiality of the knowing, in favor of some competing inquiry or value. It may be, that I make no such decision and, instead, continue looking for the motivations beneath the motivations, or those above, or was it turtles? No matter… eventually, not deciding to surrender the line of inquiry, I die of some alternate motivation. That death may be seen as some kind of surrender, and yet…

Here I find myself led again towards my initial inquiry, the seeing of “surrender” or “death” as a kind of object set apart from infinity is another surrender of inquiry into the (possibly infinite) nature of surrender, or death.

Yes, I could go on, and yes I will surrender to some (hopefully flowering) of this moment I am resolving. There is such a soft beauty, I feel in my heart when I allow the infinite to rest its little ideas of the finite in “me”.

I have questions.

When I look back through time to this place so many of us agree to call “the Big Bang”, I see a moment, like any other moment, little different than this moment, if at all. Some process of unfolding reached a point relative to us today that we could somehow “understand”. The Big Bang was not a beginning in any empirical sense so much as it was a fulcrum of understanding relative to our (collective?) Awareness today. Earlier in our history, there were other “beginning” and from now until later in our future history, there will be others…

Realizing this has, for me, implications — and I think for those of us who think and speak as well — towards the way we consider not only the nature of the vast physical universe, or the subatomic and smaller, and smaller, and smaller qualities, but our very being “within it”.

Can we find, and further can we enable a way of knowing that honors its own fuzzy beaches at the front of the vast mystery that lives at the very edge of our every breath, every being, and every…?

What kind of person, what kind of work, kind of play, kinds of community, of friendship, of identities might be enacted by such a way of knowing?

What might we feel like, if we were today, as we are?

Postscript

We are moving, “I” my identity, in the middle of a vast metaphoric sphere that contains all the things we believe, perceive, suspect, Intuit, identify, enact, experience, and more at its very center. A place so small as to be no larger than the entirety of our lives, whether that be one, or millions. If there is a beginning, then it is not linear, it is rather that single point, from which all else comes to matter. We may argue whether or not that matters at all, but that argument is the very matter to which I am gesturing. To quote the beloved Leonard Cohen “there is a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn’t.”

Begin.