Tuesday, November 8, 2022
4:05 a.m. Guys, I feel like we still haven’t gotten to the nub of our question about artists and the world. But I don’t know how to rephrase it for greater clarity. Let’s try this: I spend so much time reading stories of other lives: Where is my life? That isn’t a very clear question, but it is the best I can do. Presence, receptivity, clarity.
You aren’t seeing it right.
“Right”? There’s a “right,” now?
Let’s put it this way: If you want to get to Omaha, say, and you are on the road, any turn you make will bring you closer to it or farther from it, so will be right or wrong relative to your position and goal.
Okay, I see that. A right turn at a given place, or a left turn, or continuing straight ahead, can only be right or wrong relative to a desired end-point.
Of course. It is simple – and easily overlooked. Everything is situational. That’s what choice involves, that’s what choice is, really, a decision within context. Many a mistaken turn is taken because the chooser doesn’t put the choice within context. Not everybody wants to go to Omaha; those who do, don’t necessarily always want to go to Omaha. Those who do don’t always want to go there directly; perhaps they need to stop off in Cleveland on their way. So, it’s easy to make rules too strict for the situation. (“Always turn here, or you can’t get to Omaha,” or, even worse, “The entire Interstate Highway system was designed only to get people to Omaha, and any other location is illegitimate.”)
You see our point. It is one thing to say, “helpful in the circumstances,” or not. It is something else to say, “always helpful,” or not. And it is easy to confuse “helpful or not” with “right or wrong morally.”
So, we will rephrase. In thinking that continually reading of the lives of real or imagined others is in opposition to your really living, you are casting your life in an erroneous light. Better?
Clearer in context, anyway.
Everybody’s life is choice within context. Everybody is one part of a vast whole. Everybody is also part of a dream spun by mind-stuff. Now that you have come to understand these things, you will have to remember them, if things are going to continue opening up. We have provided you a more accurate context; employ the concepts that will allow you to build from it. So now:
- How could you rate lives in order of importance? You couldn’t.
- How in order of relevance, or potential? You’d never have the data.
- How could you weigh what input is helpful, or even necessary, and what isn’t?
- What would “wasting time” mean?
Choice is always within context. Your 3D life is always within context. One of the things that keeps it interesting is, “You never have all the facts.” You never know all the context. You never get a list of all the unfinished business. Do you imagine that life would be better if you had such a list? Easier? More productive? Superficial thought might lead you to say, “Of course it would,” but a few moments more, and maybe not. It’s like the question, “Would you like to know ahead of time when and how you are going to die? Or even, to broaden it out without expanding the sense of dread that may come with the question of death, “Would you like to know ahead of time everything that is going to happen to you?”
Hardly. It would make living so tedious. Plus I imagine you’d feel helpless, being carried from one preordained event to the next, with nothing you can do about it.
Well, the alternative is to be always flailing around in the dark, with or without flashes of insight; or else it is proceeding not in the dark, but, let’s say, in a fog, doing the best you can, proceeding always on inadequate information. In such case, you steer by instinct and you use such navigational aids as may be available; you hone your skill and you do your best, and sometimes it’s smooth sailing even without clear views, and sometimes it’s continual knuckle-biting anxiety perhaps punctuated by terror or panic.
I am reminded of one of Dion Fortune’s characters (Wilfred) who describes two forms of asthma that he experiences, and says he doesn’t know which one he prefers, “The one I don’t have at the moment, probably.” When we’re in the dark, we wish we could see. When everything is too plain, we wish we had a sense of mystery.
More or less, yes. The grass is always greener elsewhere.
So, now, you were considering your own life in the context of all lives, and you just illustrated an emotional position by means of a fictional character. Can you say that reading Dion Fortune’s novels impoverished your life? Or even left it as it was?
Certainly not, and I see your point. Input is input. But still, I don’t think that fully answers the underlying point.
Oh, you think second-hand experience is inferior to first-hand experience. We’ll be glad to agree, if you can explain to us what is first-hand and what is second-hand.
Surely it is the difference between my own experience and what I have read of other people’s real or imagined experience.
That distinction vanishes, if you touch the adjustment knob of your telescope/microscope. Remember that you are mind-stuff participating in a dream, connected to everything else in the dream, employing a somewhat-real context to focus your decisions as to what you wish to be, to stand as representative of, to uphold, to combat.
Put it another way. Say you are in training to be a soldier or an EMT or to learn any skillset you care to postulate. Your training will be largely in how to react to situations you will be imagining in training. Soldiers-to-be are not sent out immediately against enemy forces. First comes toughening up, then acquisition of skills, then live-fire exercises, etc. And similarly for any acquired skillset: Before you can actually do it, you are in one way or another pretending to do it. That is, you are practicing.
Now, the analogy isn’t as helpful as it might be, because it implies that your life is only pretend until you can get to the real thing. That is not the point we wished to make. The point is that what is imagined is not much different from what is experienced, in a way. Naturally there is all the difference in the world between war and training, or between fighting fires, or saving lives, or anything, and training. But in terms of learning, there is less than one might think.
It seems to me you are confusing things a little. You mean to say, I think, that input is input, and the processing is much the same.
It is the kind of thing that is not easily said in such a way as not to be misunderstood. To some it will seem as if we are defining away life. To others it may seem so painfully obvious as not to be worth the words spent on it.
Well, try one more time, maybe.
Life needs every kind of thing it includes – or it wouldn’t include it! Reality has no spare parts. So if some people spend their lives in ceaseless activity among things (that is, working in one way or another with inanimate objects like airplanes or tractors or power saws) and others spend their lives associating (that is, coordinating people’s activity, teaching, say, or selling insurance, or directing traffic) and others spend their lives with animals, or others spend theirs dreaming – which kind of life is a mistake? Which is obviously useless? Which is wasted?
None of them, of course.
So what is left of your question?
Point taken. Today’s theme?
“Choice,” perhaps.
Or perhaps, “No spare parts.” Very well, our thanks as always.