A Moment in Time

The perfection of our existence can only be achieved through drugs and drug use. But drugs are not the answer. The problem is perfection.

Shigenori Nagatomo’s “Japanese Zen Buddhist Philosophy” entry on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy site begins: “Zen aims at the perfection of personhood.” What I like best about this sentence is its verb: to aim. Not perfection, but our attempt to achieve it.

To aim implies a point of focus, a place to direct an intention (our attention). The arrow of Time is pointed at its target: Space. The perfect "shot" is the pin-pointing of a place (in Space) at the exact moment (in Time) as its destruction.

 

So much science is concerned with the destruction of something by looking at it (Schrödinger), or the impossibility of measuring it (Heisenberg). I am content never to reach that which I am striving for because I have found by the time I (occasionally) arrive at such places, I am no longer the person I was when I set out to reach them, that I am still (mentally) in the place I stopped at the night before, immersed in its chowder, its lager, its roaring fire below a find-what-you-are-looking-for portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft ...