“Das Ding an sich” and personal thoughts

No real epiphanies here, just some thoughts to capture before they disappear. A confession if you will…

Often I think that one of my struggles is not to come up with some new amazing never-before-thought-of idea, but rather to see things in a new light. The most insightful moments of learning for me are those in which something, an idea, set of facts, etc, that has been before my eyes and mind for a very long time are suddenly “seen” anew; I become aware of a pattern, having always existed, but now seen clearly and with a precision that was lacking before. Something starts to make sense in a way that it didn’t before, regardless of how often I had scanned over, read, or played around with it in my mind. A pre-existent truth finds its way home with a stickiness that it didn’t have before.

Thus wise, I have been pondering certain dispositions of mine, personal feelings and intuitions. The saying of Kant’s, “Das Ding an sich,” kept returning to me; “The thing in itself,” as it is known only to itself and to no other observer. I wonder how that applies to my personal feelings and sensitivities.

So often, I become convinced of the reality of my perceptions of other things and people. That is, I am convinced that my perception of them is actually how they are in themselves. I am convinced that there is no discrepancy between my thoughts and the reality of the other thing. It occurred to me that so often, this is the breeding ground for the un-pleasantries in life. Hurt, pain, anger, sadness, and all other sorts of ill-feelings that are all based on my believing my understanding to be the reality of the situation. How often does this misconception, this wholesale buying of personal interpretations lead directly to sorrow and personal torment? How often does it shape my subsequent actions for the worse?

There is something else here, something pleading to be dug up, to be examined but I don’t as yet know exactly what it is or how to excavate it. Some way of seeing the same old things with a new vision that has slipped away for the present. Maybe it is simply an inner longing to see the old things in a new way, a request for a new vision? I don’t know. Does anyone really understand that, the internal struggle for dealing with the same old trials in a new way? It is a longing to escape for a moment the inner thoughts and voices that seem to struggle against each other, realizing that I have heard all these same thoughts before, played around with them in the same old ways, and have grown tired of their endless banter, their same tired conclusions producing the same tired actions and results.