A striking transition–LOK 14

In LOK chapter 14, I appreciate the painstaking analysis of how descriptive knowledge–in order to be legitimately based on polar knowledge–requires three things: access to the contents of polar knowledge; accuracy of polar knowledge itself; and an existing world to be accurately known.  Then a page or two later, the tone changes dramatically, beginning with the phrase: “This common sense view may be proceeding at the wrong level of concern.”  There follows a beautiful invocation of the intolerable loss to our human being entailed in blindly accepting the unquestioned assumptions, which the chapter earlier takes seriously enough to analyze.

Like a piece of music in which a repetitive theme, reiterated until it threatens to become grating and boring, suddenly falls away, leaving the essential melody hanging there: pure, evocative, and speaking directly to some true part of our being; the TSK books have a way of engaging the intellectual mind to the point of exhaustion and then pulling aside the obsuring veil to reveal some simple truth.

The question: “Are we making our way when we are headed nowhere, travelling only in the well-worn circles of past conditioning?”  leaps out–with a warning and a promise of something else.  Is the part of us that responds to such invocations itself the “phantom bridge”, able to link moments and providing an understanding deeper than either polar knowledge, descriptive knowledge, or the encapsulated moments used to spoon out their content?  I wonder if, practicing the exercise for this chapter, it may be possible to come closer to this kind of awareness.  I plan to sit with that question a bit more.  –Michael