Sun Tzu,
In the course of my scholastic and spiritual education I have studied and or experienced, to greater and lesser extent, many different faiths: Protestant Christianity, Mormonism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Shamanism, Chinese geomancy (feng shui), Confucianism, and Hinduism. All, AND NONE, offered a unified field theory of life and creation.
Every once in a while a yellow jacket (magnificent creature, so finely detailed, so intelligent in its own way, so loyal and persistent in its tasks, truly one of God's wonders) will get trapped inside my kitchen and bang repeatedly against the glass window trying to get out. In a yellow jacket world, this is one smart little fellow, can negotiate miles of square and cubic distances, find his little home, report on his explorations, serve his tribe. To a yellow jacket, a clear path in front of him means clear sailing. So how can this pane of glass, which represents nothing to him, stop him in his flight? It is a puzzlement. Bang, bang, buzz, buzz. He can do nothing against the power of heated sand (glass) to proceed to the next step, yet he is powerless to suss out how to get from the increasingly unfriendly Here (my kitchen, facing my bug swatter) to There (fresh air, the aerial path to the nest). Bang, bang, buzz, buzz.
Swat.
How can the human mind comprehend, totally, a universe which might have, 14 billion years ago, been shrunk something smaller than a grain of sand, and which exploded into the cosmos? And if we can comprehend that (quick, look out the window and try to comprehend squeezing all that you see into a dust mote), then how do we comprehend what came before all that squeezing (who made it, why, "who" didn't make it, why?)???
We are like the yellow jacket only infinitely less capable of comprehending our own particular glass. To this limited yellow jacket typing on the puter, the answer would appear to be all in one sentence in Job, and many other places.
And, when you wrote, "If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles."
How do you come up with all these great sayings in your book, by the way? (I especially like the tale of the King's concubines made into regiments!)
Kb |
