Infinite Wonder

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OK, Wunderkammern and Infinities. The last two night's posts have hinted at the kind of Zen that I espouse and kind of follow, as following is not really my kind of thing, if you know what I mean. What do I mean by this? Good question and no doctrinal answer will do, as I don't do doctrine or dogma. The easiest way to approach it is by trawling back and accessing your store of childhood memories, before adolescence clouded your mind with sex and aspirations for your future life; a time when there was stuff that needed to be dealt with, in the moment, on the spot, day in, day out. When priorities were as and when they presented themselves, not part of some grand plan as yet to be formulated let alone unfold.

In short, child-mind: the mind-state untainted by the weight of the future yet to be, entangled as it inevitably will be by the exigencies of daily necessity and struggle. Sometimes, those travails and the baggage of formal education plus the abstraction of 'career path' in the necessary world of work detract from the essential nature of the human condition: choice and person in apposition to the external world into which we are unwittingly thrown at birth. We rely absolutely on the society of others to survive and thrive, materially and intellectually, but ultimately each of us is quite alone in our own self, set apart from even our closest family and lovers by the very barrier of our singular personal consciousness.

A Wunderkammer is a cabinet or room of curiosities, akin to the individual mind, the essential difference being that this personal Wunderkammer is closed to all else; not just a chosen few, but all else. No-one has access to the inner chambers of one's Wunderkammer save ourselves. Within that Wunderkammer is an infinitude of possibility and variation, not simply comprised of what we might imagine to be 'concrete' memories, but of an ever-shifting and reshaping of our world experience as it unfolds throughout  our lives: the infinity of infinities that is human consciousness has no bounds and the trick we must learn is to appreciate without thought or word that infinitude, and rise beyond those restrictions. Zen.

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