My Own Apocalypse

One thing that really clicked with me in class yesterday was that Nicholas (from John Fowles' The Magus) experienced an apocalypse in his interactions with Conchis. The entire charade that Conchis organized worked to unveil things so that Nicholas could see the reality of his situation in life. Sure it was exhausting and frustrating and difficult for him to go through, but was it not worth it to be brought to awareness?

Some say that "ignorance is bliss," but it seems like ignorance is really just a limiting factor; it keeps people living on the surface rather than in the depths. And it is this notion that brings me to another element of The Magus that I wish we could have discussed further: the infamous quote, "An answer is always a form of death" (Fowles 637).

I realize that answers should not be handed out. As a future educator, it is extremely important to me that people, though possibly guided, find answers on their own. This process of discovery teaches self-sufficiency, which is the most important thing for a person to have. Therefore, handing answers out kills in a very negative way. However, when we are finding answers on our own - when we are going out and experiencing things and observing things and feeling things - are we really doing anything negative? My answer: no.

To repeat what I have said in previous blogs/class discussions, death is not a bad thing. Death is a complete surrender of ourselves. Have you ever surrendered? Think for a minute of a time when you were plagued by something to which you fully surrendered (sleep, hunger, maybe a work of art you did). And now imagine doing that to life in general; giving yourself fully to whatever current moved through you and pushed you along. You may not ever know what is coming, but the movement would be easy would it not? When we search out answers on our own we are not pushing against that current and creating some unnatural motion. If answers were bad why would we have brains so quick to learn and explore? Rather, when we find answers on our own we are simply brought to another level of depth in the river that is life. Or, to refer back to my blog on valence electrons as a model of life, we move into a different "shell" or energy level.

Another thing: the world is full of questions. The world is made of questions. No one could ever possibly even begin to answer all of them. To even take one thing, let's say an acorn, and study it all your life and devote all of your time and energy to answering all the possible questions about that one thing would be impossible. And this is important because it means that we will NEVER run out of questions; we will never cease in our explorations, and at the end of all our exploring will be to arrive were we started and know the place for the first time.

I have been having apocalyptic dreams for the last few weeks. Every single night a different version of the apocalypse plays out in my head and I awake thinking, "Man that was a striking and deep and multi-faceted dream, what does it mean?" And I finally realized it. Over the last year or so I have been experiencing my own apocalypse. The world has been unveiled and I have been seeing it with new eyes; I have been finding answers which only lead to more questions - deeper, more significant questions. I have had an entire cast of "actors" (mostly teachers, but also some friends and family members) that have put me through a stage of complete disorientation and confusion (like that of Nicholas) and I have gained a new perspective because of it. If we don't question, we don't learn. Descartes spent his whole life trying to show people that; we must always question. But finding answers doesn't mean we are doing something wrong or bad for ourselves, it simply readies us for the next level of questions, which will surely be even more intense and personal.