The Examined Rock

I want to make sure my judgments are my own.  I've been influenced by other people to my detriment too many times to not be cautious about this.

Still, the more I interact with other people and the world, the more I learn what I really believe ... and don't believe.  I liken this to my being a rough stone, which is put in a rock tumbler with other stones.  The rough edges stick out the way I put my ideas out in the world.  Some of the sharp corners are smoothed away by rubbing up against intractable facts and other people's beliefs that hadn't occurred to me on my own.

     But social interaction is a "magic" rock tumbler; some of the interaction fortuitously pounds rocks together in such a way that flat facets are created - meeting points of self and world, where the world is reflected out without distortion.  A number of facets, in turn, lead out inexorably to angles - the personally-perceived implications of those commonly-accepted flat understandings.  All this happens because when people are put into the tumbler, unlike rocks we move in our own directions.  Thus much of the movement isn't haphazard smashing and rolling around; it is directed by people's free will.  This is what permits both the polishing down of beliefs and the sharpening of angles making beliefs even more pronounced.

     The role of the tumbling machine, a regular churning, is analogous to the role of the physical environment.  The walls of the tumbler are the confinement of unyielding reality, representing the way we all bump up against natural laws in our attempts to control our trajectories.

The result is a polished gem: My true ideas, the beauty of them revealed by the process of tumbling.

This process works best for me when I alternate between tumbling and private polishing.  The soft, sensitive private polishing washes the dust from my tumbling thoughts - getting rid of the little bits of other people's gems that have clung to me.  Going from my contemplative states into the tumbler and back gives me the requisite alone time to clean myself, but continually grinds away my misconceptions about other people and the world.

It’s frustrating when my prejudices stick out into the tumbler, scratching up other people, the jagged edges grinding themselves up into dust that sticks to us all, obscuring our true humanity.  But staying in the tumbler, combined with honest introspection, removes these imperfections.

This is a seemingly never-ending process ... The gem getting smaller and smaller, until just the essential kernel, the really important basic truths - my fundamental convictions - are revealed.

Yet we’ve all heard the stories of grooms losing the precious rings they needed for their weddings.  The smaller the gem, the easier it is to lose it out in the world - in the tumbler.  The dust from the grinding just covers you up, the tumbler swallows you up, the grinding really never does stop, and ultimately the self is ground away.  But without the tumbler, how would this gem have been cut?  It would have remained a wild rock.

The important thing is to undertake really looking at the gem.  Some people never do.  You’ve got to wipe the dust off to do that; you need time to meditate.  It’s said the common mass of people see in rough diamonds only a rock.  The master diamond cutters bring out the hidden individual beauty of each unique stone.  Some say God can see into the deepest recesses of our souls.  Be that as it may, the ultimate diamond cutting and polishing responsibilities are ours.

The examined life truly is worth living.  But it can only be fully appreciated by a true craftsman equipped with a high-quality loupe.