Fishing With Pascal
While fly fishing this last week I couldn’t stop thinking about a quote by the French mathematician, physicist and religious philosopher Blase Pascal. He said:
“In a word man knows he is wretched. Thus he is wretched because he is so, but he is truly great because he knows it.” Blaise Pascal
His words got me thinking – if I seek the truth and refuse to admit how far I am from it, I become arrogant or religious. If I accept how far I am from it, but then do not seek it I become cynical. However, if I seek the truth while accepting how far I am from it, wisdom is my servant.
So what is it that most hinders me from truth? It isn’t ignorance, social conditioning or weakness of reason; it seems to be my passions. Like an addict I cannot see truly or realistically that my mind is blinded by my passions. My mind is scrambled and confused – not by a drug, but by my addiction to the drug!
“A man is a slave to whatever he cannot part with that is less than himself.” George McDonald
It seems to me that Arrogance is the greatest hinderance to truth for me. My feelings of superiority blind me from seeing the truth. Thank God for his grace that brings back to earth, back to reality through circumstances, friends or grand children.
JR
Hi Dan
It keeps occurring to me how much life is a paradox. On life’s stage each of us as actors are simultaneously individual, community, and other. Right in this moment, “other” for me is grappling.
One of the great grapples is how I am magnificent AND a mess; my magnificance is coming through in that I grapple with the reality of my mess, and then out of my mess I get to grapple with being magnificent and a mess.
Truthfully, the grapple can drive me crazy OFTEN! I hate it.
Truthfully, I love it. Tons of wisdom about life and for living is to be had in the midst of the grapples.
What a mystery! What a paradox! What a life!
PS
How was the fishing?
)
If I add a dimension of physics to “grapple” and call it darkness, it’s what comes out of the darkness(or into the darkness or mixes with the darkness; I’m not sure which is which) – the light – that is so amazing, insightful, and awe-inspiring!
So, darkness and light are both wise friends.
Darkness, light, me, you, individual, community, the grapple, the wisdom, the wretchedness, the arrogance, all of us and everything – it’s all music AND it’s all a dance.
In the moment, what we make of it all, each of us gets to choose: it’s our own interpretation that makes the music and becomes the dance.