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Oration

Page history last edited by PBworks 17 years, 10 months ago

 

Meditations of a Growing Consciousness

 

-Jason Nguyen, Reynolds Scholarship Senior Oration

 

The single-minded pursuit of common-sense goals,

The expected,

The probable,

The this-is-what-someone-practical-would-do-and-it’s-foolish-to-dwell-in-dreams.

Such were the wits of one freshman four years ago

Who stood on the shoulders of giants, blessed by the bodhisattvas

To have always found his path bejeweled and comfortable.

In awkward transition, now child, now man, yet child again,

His mind a Never-Never Land of invulnerability and invincibility,

And at once he became institutionalized.

For indeed he was crazed, thinking he was as level-headed and rational as the rest,

Never once realizing that he had not yet made his life his own.

Externalized responsibility is never self-responsibility,

But merely a burden misdirected, carried half-heartedly

For the sake of others—one might very well not perform the task at all.

 

The great sage upon Benares once declared

That to thirst was to suffer.

Yet while the craving of the great majority tends toward the material

And although any craving binds one to the causal wheel of samsara,

This thirst was driven by knowledge and not ignorance.

Ancient scripts declare thus, that

“To manage your mind, know that there is nothing,

and then relinquish all attachment to nothingness.”

Thus to attach to knowledge too dearly is itself a trap,

And it is said that this pit is yet more perilous.

In this manner the crisis unveiled itself,

For while the world appeared to revel in its ignorance,

Rejoiced in intoxicated frenzy and sensual delight,

A lone shadow nightly festered with dejection,

Frustrated by his own inadequacies,

Feeling that he alone cared,

And fearing that he alone could not possibly care enough.

 

Idealism approaches infinity at the rate of one’s naiveté.

The burdens of an entire world appear to be

A small matter to the unchallenged mind.

And so he did it all, as he had done before,

Not realizing that the great change of maturity was not one of quantity,

But one of magnitude.

For it is one thing to read the poets and quite another to be a poet,

One thing to play at music and another to be a musician,

One thing to study scientists and another to be a scientist,

One thing to feign manhood and another to be a man.

Thus the child who dabbles in all things increases his potentialities

But the man who does the same must ultimately choose.

Liken him to the bonsai, a controlled microcosm,

But to be pruned by nobody but himself.

With each cut, the wound grows fuller and broader,

Let it grow wild, and one will never go back.

What then is this ‘Renaissance Man’ but a pure ideal,

To be wrestled away together with innocence?

 

The songs of experience must necessarily be sung,

But surely not with the voice of the jaded and decrepit.

For the most beautiful renditions I have ever heard,

Were man’s experiences coupled with the spirit of child’s innocence,

Man’s purpose, with the wonder and curiosity of vital youth.

Oh how I have tried to grasp as if at the stars,

Infinite in number, but ultimately futile!

Why did I not grasp at the mirror instead?

Just one reflection of self, infinite in depth.

Yes it was the craving of an unassailable youth,

The inebriating thirst that magnifies impetuosity—

Only the impatient hear the creaking of Time’s pendulum,

For those who know better find infinity between tick and tock.

 

"One string with all words light and heavy,

Half a gourd containing a world of sound.”

Thus did my ancestors describe the monochord,

The Aeolian harp for which an entire people were the wind,

An enveloping, refreshing breeze,

A tumultuous, spell-binding tempest.

That which nourished the entirety of my being,

On a single thread stretched across the cosmos.

Let me be the one-stringed instrument of humanity,

Not single-minded in scope but penetrating in capacity.

Let my notes reverberate upon the processes of universal consciousness,

Built upon the sympathetic harmonies of human compassion,

And in that way let me gather strength

As a chord gathers force in stacked tonalities,

Not the archivist of collected human wisdom,

But rather the purveyor of that wisdom through the sinews of the collective psyche.

 

What of responsibility? Of purpose?

An instrument without its song

Is merely a silent block of wood

Un-tuned and un-played, how might it participate in Life?

That song, Reason and Purpose, is to be tailored to each individual,

An open concerto, to be composed by us all—

Now my cadenza, now your’s, then a duet!

Each voice plays its part in Nature’s Symphony.

And finally, the cadence, the moment of our human unison,

Bound by love for our brethren in our web of fellow-feeling.

 

These lines, begun in confusion,

Wrapped in what one must do because the world beckons,

And what one must do because the insulated self does not yet see,

Are now the clairvoyant prism of my mind works.

Those are not neurotransmitters running between my synapses,

But captured shards of human intellect

Running between a highway of action—potentials they call it,

Is it not ironic that science could be so poetic?

But no, in this casing of irony lies a pebble of truth,

For have I not spent four years chasing this Poetic Scientist myself?

Searched after that thing in the systematic reduction of the Goddess Nature

That actually celebrates Her being and Her masterpiece?

That chef d’ouvre—it joins me now, making this existence worthwhile,

The turning of internal clockwork jolted into being by another’s sparks.

Beautiful causality.

Process is itself being, without beginning or end,

Our motion causing us to be moved,

Our loving the one and only prerequisite to Our Love.

 

Thus, for as long as I have wrestled with

Being somewhere, someplace, sometime,

That wrestling must by matter of course continue,

For what else remains in stagnancy but death of body and intellect?

The equilibrium of internal peace is never static,

But dynamic and ever-changing,

A force vigilante to the random debris

Thrust upon our faces along the road of Time.

We travel continuously as nomads from fertile ground to ground,

Planting seeds to be revisited some generation hence,

And with us, we carry a single precious flask called Humanity,

Containing, for all to share, the quenching waters of Compassion.

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