Beauty
Bo Diddley Knows for Sure
This is a selection from my book, The Other Road Ahead
My Comment
The Rock & Roll 🎵 legend, Bo Diddley's* song proclaims "You Can't Judge a Book by the Cover", but how many times have we heard that old saying and not really thought about what it means in a larger context. The act of "looking"👀 at the outer layer is part of perceiving the world and along with our other "senses" it forms a picture of this material environment. The reading suggests that position is incomplete and Buddhist☸ philosopher B. Allan Wallace puts it this way,
By embracing a new open-mindedness, we may begin to explore the potentials of consciousness, and investigate the powerful role of mind in the natural world.... potentially leading us to a new era of human flourishing.**
In other words there is more to it than just sense data.
Bo Diddley agrees saying ‘you can't judge sugar by looking at the cane’, for instance. By only going surface deep this view of people leaves out most of the person in the same way that just looking at a rock or tree tells you everything about the planet🌎. Reality is very complicated. Reducing ones judgment to only face value is a perilous mistake.
** Tricycle, B. Alan Wallace, 9/13/21
To purchase the book, The Other Road Ahead
Don’t miss anything. Click the archive link to access the previous posts. The last newsletter, Entropy, dealt with the untold story of artists being destroyed by Covid.
Putting Diddley and Wallace together on the same page did not seem like a stretch to me. Coming from different directions they were emphasizing non-material elements of our world. Willie Dixon wrote the lyrics but Bo put the emotional content which literally added a new dimension to the impact. We can only “see” part of the picture but there is more.
This is an outstanding read. David’s intuitiveness can be surprising.