What is this miraculously connected attunement I feel toward my balloon? What does this affinity reveal about the essence of my own nature? What does that shiny, vibrant sphere bring into my modus of understanding and how can or will it remain in that status?
Knowing one's own balloon is not the same thing as simply acquiring new knowledge in a new landscape with a new animal to guide the way. Knowing one's own balloon requires full existential involvement.
To keep your balloon inflated throughout your many dreams and with your many guides and companions, you must adopt a kind of Heideggean philosophy, you must not take seriously the possibility of total reduction of spirit to plain intelligence.
For Heidegger, preservation of spirit as a wholeness of being became the central theme of his philosophy. Thinking is authentic, constitutive only if it is an existential outcry, if it is the voice of being.
But what about my balloon? Can I truly sense it in its silenced presence of being? If my vision of a balloon, my understanding of my balloon is misguided, do I then stop seeing the balloon?
Directing our focus back onto ourselves, beyond the place of doubt and straight and shallow superficiality, we uproot our self from consciousness with liberating thoughts...
thoughts that eventually lead to the oblivion of being, to the popping of our own balloon.
Heidegger calls this the emasculation of the spirit...
As Heidegger puts it "the spirit falsified into intelligence thus falls to the level of a tool in the service of others, a tool the manipulation of which can be taught and learned" (Heidegger, p. 248).
~ surrounded by a sort of spiritual gravity, the closer we are to the center of ourselves, the higher our balloons rise and the more clearly our essence of being can perceive the world.
In honor of keeping a healthy, constitutive tension between spiritual awareness of being and intellectual reflection ...
When I was a very young child, a balloon was a seriously bittersweet thing. The first day it was so amazing, so outstandingly beautiful compared to everything else in the world, that I just loved it beyond all reason. The second or third day, of course, it was a shrunken, wrinkled, shriveled latex husk, lurking behind the sofa, giving me gooseflesh whenever I dared to look at it. Before I lost my first pet, or I gave up my stuffed bunny because of allergies, I was already learning about the fragility of joy and beauty by saying farewell to balloons.
ReplyDeleteNot quite the metaphor you were working today, I know, but I was still moved to share.
<3 <3 <3