simplicity

I wrote 8 pages on simplicity and realized that is not simplicity so I am going to struggle and keep this short. 

 “Plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities.”

– Life on the Mississippi – Mark Twain

“The clever will be deceived”

Somewhere in my readings of Taoism I read this.   Maybe it is my quote.  I can’t find it.

This is the passage where the rich man runs up to Jesus and says,

“Teacher, what must I do to experience eternal life?” and Jesus responds by saying, “Sell all that you have and give the money to the poor…for it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

Mark 10:17-31

The truth is only found in simplicity for the truth is simple complexity.  It is this incongruous juxtaposition that is paradoxical.  The circular nature of the human condition written about by the greatest of those in the past points to a cycle of knowing and not knowing.  This can’t be deviated from.  It is the central nature of intelligence because it is only by losing ourselves, we find ourselves.  This is true of the individual as well as the collective.

If you want to find the truth at some point you must stop looking.  You have to look and this is part of it.  You will not find it and this is part of it.  This is the way and it is the simplicity of this process that is required.  Nothing is simpler than failure.  All is found in failure.  You are naked and alone and it is at that point you find it.

The collective is at this point.  You may be there too as the individual.  The collective is locked into this process beyond human intervention because this is the self-organizing process of billions of decisions that must run its course.  This is the consequences of complicated behavior in a complexity of civilization.  The end game is destruction because this is the basics of the dualism found in humanism.  Fighting it just makes it worse.  Embrace humility and failure by acceptance.

You the individual on the other hand can embrace this locally in people and place even within this end game of civilization where civilization discovers it is naked and alone.  You can find the burst of constructive growth within the destructive process of the human ecosystem self-destructing in its late stage.  You can’t transcend this but it can be transformed.

Simplicity is required.  Go into nature and become natural.  This is relative and realistic within the trap you are in.  The trap is the same for all individuals.  It is now all of our civilization that is unravelling.  Grace will visit you.  It will trick you by you outwitting your wit.  You will only find this through simplicity because an oak can’t grow in the desert.  Birds can’t fly in the sea.  Man can’t know the truth.  He can only get closer to it in humility.