Our life has a boundary, but there is no boundary to knowledge. To use what has a boundary to pursue what is limitless is dangerous.It's natural for people to want to know where they come from. We want to know how we fit into things and if we were planned. These are powerful questions and go along way toward explaining why a great many adopted children spend a lot of time and money trying to find their birth parents.
So says Chuang Tzu (Chapter 3).
Yet, as Chuang Tzu aptly points out, there's a limit to what a human being can comprehend. While it's one thing to want to find your birth parent, it's quite another to try to understand the why and how all life began on this little orb.
And let's get down to brass tacks. No one knows now nor will ever know what sparked life from nothingness. It doesn't matter if you are a devoutly religious person, a philosophical Taoist or an atheist. It is a type of knowledge that is beyond the realm of human understanding.
Since it's impossible to understand, Chuang Tzu suggests you quit trying to figure it out. All you're doing is wasting precious moments of your finite time on earth.
Concentrate on what you can learn and comprehend; forget about what you can never know.
As someone who was adopted, I find your analogy to be very interesting, but I don't agree with your conclusion.
ReplyDeleteI don't agree that searching for an explanation of the origins of the universe or just the planet Earth, or life on Earth, is a waste of time, or that the answers to these questions are beyond human understanding.
Concentrate on what you can learn and comprehend; forget about what you can never know.
I don't like placing limits on what human beings can know. If you follow your logic, how do we even know what exactly it is that we can "never know"?
No, I'm more inclined to question how one goes about searching for answers and what their motivation is. If they are desperate, if they are motivated by the terror of not knowing, not only are they avoiding doing the personal work of addressing the underlying emotional problems, but I'd go so far as to wonder how susceptible to making major mistakes in their scientific work they are.
Great stuff to think about, as always, Trey!