Posing Questions

Just try to imagine yourself as solely a human. Close your eyes, and picture a world just barely emerged from prehistory, the threshold at which an ape became a man. Forget your culture, your education, your social games, all of yourself that has been merely acquired; don’t look at what you’ve come to be, but at what you’ve always been.
Humanity is dawning: This stunning, fractal phenomenon known as self-awareness (“I think, therefore I am, therefore I think this, therefore this is,” et cetera) just barely popped into existence between these flowing atoms, as evolution opens your eye into the abstract world.
Imagine the potentialities! At this moment, this crux of existence in which life, as we know it, acquires meaning, this fresh breath taken into Mind, there are no expectations or establishments, norms or systems or disciplines or sciences. There is only you, and your amazing human mind, which, opened up to a highly complex and beautiful world, eagerly and immediately flexes to absorb, interpret and analyze all the memories it can catch hold of.
You are capable of grasping the works of Pythagoras, and of Aristotle. If you desired, you could master the arts explored by Newton and Einstein, or argue positions taken by Nietzsche or Plato. It doesn’t matter, in the very least, that none of these men have existed yet; you have the same gift of consciousness that gave birth to their knowledge, and their ability to share it by teaching. All of their potentials lie within you, their common ancestor of thought.
But mathematics has not come to be; nor science, nor music, nor writing, nor art. Theory itself has only just become a theory, one that you are desperate to prove.
So what is it that you would think about here, at this moment of awakening? The slate is blank, every idea is original, and every concept is invention.
What fills the empty spaces of the human Mind?
Buddhism might call this nirvana, the moment of an abstract entity’s perfect freedom from attachment to or knowledge of the concrete world.
Judeo-Christian tradition describes a Tree of Knowledge, which cast humanity from paradise.
Perhaps Eden was the bliss of ignorance, before men laid the first brick in their tower of collective knowledge to challenge God.
Perhaps it was something more, though.
Come back to the present, and take a second to appreciate how much man has invented, what a world we have created for ourselves. So much knowledge has been acquired, so many things discovered and learned and engineered, that we cannot help but feel superior to our foolish predecessors, who dug through the mud with sticks and stone tools. How much cleverer we are than they! we think.
But look over to your average citizen in the human nation, this modern manifestation of generations of accomplishment, in whom all previous thoughts culminate, and ask yourself whether that person is any wiser than Socrates. Is he any more inventive than Da Vinci? More ethical than Jesus? Happier than Buddha? More eloquent than Homer?
Of course not, so then what has he stood to gain from all these inherited standards and paradigms?
And what has he stood to lose?