In a recent conversation with Dominic Kelleher in Brussels we discovered a joint appreciation of the poems and songs of
Leonard Cohen and Dominic told me of one of his favorite songs and a quote from it that I too particularly liked. This was the quote.
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
But then in googling the song and the quote I found this fragment from an interview with Leonard Cohen that brought the words even more to live for me.
In another song you also say "There's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in". It is not a very happy thought to believe that something will always have to break, to open a crack, in order to the light gets in...
It is a happy thought if we enjoy the truth. There is always something that will have to break. Usually it is our personal pride.
A Buddhist thinker said that disappointment is a great way to illumination. Other masters said: "from the broken debris of my heart I will erect an altar to the Lord".
The idea that there is a staircase of gold and marble, which leads to knowledge is seductive, but seems to me that the idea of something needing to get broken before we can learn anything is a more true idea. It is my experience, maybe you can escape it, but I doubt it. Unless the heart breaks, we will never know anything about love. As long as our objective universe doesn't collapse, we'll never know anything about the world.
We think that we know the mechanism, but only when it fails we understand how intricate and mysterious is the operation. So, it is true, "there's a crack in everything", all human activity is imperfect and unfinished. Only that way we can have the notion that there's something inside us that can only be located through disillusion, bad luck and defeat. Unfortunately, that seems to be the case.
Some interesting food for thought on KM from an enexpected source. I love it!
