The day I run out of things to say is the day I get it...

What to write, what to write...? I never realised how difficult writing actually is. To a certain extent, I can understand the frustration that real writers feel as it is very, very difficult to put into words ideas and concepts that are not really meant to be expressed through words. Hints are probably a better term for this, as really, everything that is known only ever becomes known through indirect means, even if some of these means are less indirect than others.

This leads quite nicely to the idea of reading between the lines. So often, the most important parts of anything are to be found on a deeper reflection. The acceptance of face value as a binding truth seems to me to be a dangerous practice. It seems to be a natural enough thing to do though as everyone does it. Yet, as Carl Jung once wrote, "Before the bar of nature and fate, unconsciousness is never accepted as an excuse; on the contrary there are severe penalties for it."

When Jung writes about the 'bar of nature and fate', I am reminded of Hatsumi-sensei, who wrote that man too often educates himself in the narrow world of human knowledge. When compared within itself, human knowledge seems to have increased and progressed but compared to what is NOT known, then surely the limitations of human knowledge becomes clear. We just don't know as much has we think we do. And the knowledge that we do have isn't as grand as it first appears. So in a sense, Jung is perfectly right when he says that unconsciousness is never accepted as an excuse. The world, the universe, is much, much vaster in scope than what our thinking patterns limit us to. Acceptance of this means we start to become 'less' unconscious. How 'less' unconscious we become, is of course entirely up to our own efforts.

I've been told that there is always more, that there is always something extra. This something extra reminds us that what we do think we know is in fact a limitation, albeit a necessary one if we are to keep progressing. In our budo, we are continually remindd of kyojitsu no tenkan ho, the method of interchanging truth and falsehood. The ability to perceive this continual interchange of what is true and what is not is also expressed in Jung's quote. While the knowledge that we have attained is of some merit, if we go back to the notion that there is always something more, then really, such knowledge, as it is attained, becomes a falsehood that needs to be progressed beyond for any further development.

Even though everything that I have written here may sound 'logical', it is also a theory and nothing more...