At the threshold to the path which winds up to my favorite wall, a shirtless man sat in his wheelchair. His belongings, including plastic bags, two bibles, bars of soap, and canned foods were strewn about the floor.

We exchanged friendly greetings; he wished to move beneath the sun and asked for help moving his belongings beside him.

As I began moving bags and books from one spot to another, a conversation sprung to life. It soon became clear that this man was cut from a different cloth as others: his choice of words was deliberate, calculated, and he spoke of sharpening the mind. He probed with ideas, and not one to let an interesting idea drift by, I delayed my training session to speak with this man.

At first, I thought I was benevolently entertaining the incoherent thoughts of a person to whom life has been too harsh, that his fancy words were dead husks around disorganized ideas, a simulacrum of intellectus. But I was soon humbled, and I slowly realized I was face to face with a fully lucid mind. And beyond that, that this was a mind that was very meticulous in how it organized itself, and that I might have something to learn from him.

(It is at this point that I wish to make clear - it doesn't matter how coherent a person is or how fragmented their thoughts are: all humans are worth speaking to. We have something to learn from all. Every soul shines, even if the vessel has been broken by the hardships of this city and society.)

Our back and forth evolved into a discourse. We spoke at length about mind after death, the nature of knowledge and wisdom. He confronted my presuppositions, and when my points were unclear he demanded clarification. In turn, when I requested from him more clarity he was able to provide it as well.

The discussion culminated on some ideas about intuition, which my friend believed was a critical capacity for discerning truth. He called it an aptitude, a capacity for seeing what IS. I added that intuition is the product of observations and experiences (in more or less the fashion of Bayesian inference). In this moment, his eyes lit up as he agreed, and maybe my own reflected it. We paused to dwell in our own independent realizations, the product of a relationship between two minds, that could not have occurred alone.

And on the wall, the fruit…

And as I stood on my wall, letting the events of that exchange percolate through me, a gut punch of realization struck. It was something I always believed, had words for, but now affected me more powefully.

I have long had the idea that we can only know things by refining our models. (Where my friend believes we can know an absolute truth, I am not sure.) And to know anything at depth, it must be juxtaposed against its environment. In addition, it can be used to shed light on the environment. Any phenomenon or philosophy can be a lens for constructing an understanding of the world, but similarly, at this moment of exposure to the world/environment, we gain clarity about that phenomenon as well.

You, like any phenomenon or philosophy, can be used to understand the world, and vice versa.

It reminds me of a description Ido once gave, of rubbing up against the world to know yourself, to discover the contours of your own existence. At this moment, perched on the wall and beneath the trees, this concept became a focal point for pulling together my practice on the wall, my relationship with this man, my interpretation of the ideas we discussed about intuition and wisdom.

And parallel to this, a sense that I am not different from my environment, or from that man. The difference between the inside and the outside, say of a cell, is really only the barrier. But otherwise, there is no difference between those two constructs.

------

What a blessing is a practice that takes you into the world, to rub up against it.