Learning as we do largely through books, we have been forced to think in sequences we designate as rational. This leads us to define existence and everything that makes it up in a dictionary way. It is the drawback of such a definition that its very precision robs a word of resonance. There is a complex series of echoes emitted by every word, just as filaments of meaning stretch from fact to fact, making nonsense of our Cartesian clarity. The language of logic, like that of dictionaries and the constructions of mathematics, leads us to a truth which is of one kind, truth as particular, singular, arrived at by the elimination of alternatives. The fact that we simplify the world in this way does not, however, mean that the world is equally simple. Neither does the fact that this is how we have learned to understand the world mean that it is the only way the world can be understood. Nor, indeed, does it mean that the world so understood is the only world open to our understanding. We create what we become aware of, at least to some extent, by the sense we use to apprehend it. If you show a dog a book of philosophy, the dog will use its nose in order to decide what it is. It will have a series of categories – food/not food, dog/not dog and so on – that will serve as its criteria for judging the scents that are its primary data. It will as a result very soon lose interest in the book. That will not be because of a defect in its sense of smell, it will be because ability, instinct and experience force it to use the wrong sense for the task. In the same way, the manner in which we perceive the world may not be inadequate, given the senses we are employing; it may simply be irrelevant because we are employing the wrong senses. The World of the Sufi
Posted on: Sat, 18 Oct 2014 14:06:15 +0000
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