Friday, October 20, 2017
When one differentiates carefully between the personal and impersonal, a clearer understanding of one’s position in the world results.
Your lives are pre-shaped, we might say, by whatever internal baffles and conduits and intersections you bring to them by what you are. You know you are not psychologically simple. This may lead directly to that, in defiance of intellectual logic but perfectly following emotional logic laid down by past experience. If something reminds you of something else because they are linked in your mind by an unpleasant experience, the connection may not be otherwise obvious or logical or even sensible, but it will be no less strong for that. You know this; it is your experience of life. Many a psychoanalyst or psychotherapist makes a good living helping people manage under circumstances caused by these often subterranean relationships.
But life is the working-out of such problems, and the problems are where the treasure is. Just as you wouldn’t like a movie or book without tension, or a crossword puzzle without difficulty, or a game without adequate competition, so a 3D life without internal problems to be resolved if possible would be empty. Instead of pain or trouble or annoyance, think intricacy. You are in 3D life to work out (by living them) the problems you bring to it. In the living, you often enough add more problems, or different ones, or new dimensions to older ones, but this is not a failure nor even a marching-in-place. Again we say it is not in result but in process that reality inheres.
Well, you say “again,” but I don’t know that you’ve ever quite put it that way.
But you understand the gist. Just as we said that it is not what happens to you but what changes in you that counts? This is the same thing. Emotionally, mentally, physically, the living of the thing is the real work. The reshaping of yourself is the real result. The process by which the reshaping occurs may be said to be of lesser importance, or of overall importance, depending on how you look at it.
That isn’t real clear. It is either a tautology or it is cryptic.
Well, it isn’t complicated. From one point of view, how you get to a new place is incidental, and what is important is where you get to. From another, the journey itself is the important thing, and it makes less difference where it ends, as any end is only temporary anyway. We have told you, often enough, that we’re always on Plan B. That doesn’t mean that we’re always settling for second-best (or worse), but that we concentrate on continuing the journey, and if the winds blow us here instead of there, that’s no loss.
But the contrary view – that the incidents of the journey matter less than the arrival – is somehow also true.
Correct. Logically self-contradictory, but then, so much of life is. Contradictions are always resolved at a higher level of understanding. As you have been told, the universe contains all contradictions within it, but it cannot contradict itself.
So let’s go back to the point. Are the emotional events of your life personal or impersonal? It’s a matter of viewpoint, but it isn’t a matter of indifference which viewpoint you adapt. Your choice will affect how you see the world (and of course will affect your life in the world) and therefore will alter what comes to you.
That last may be more obvious to you than to us.
Surely it is obvious that how you see the world affects how you react to the world. Someone convinced that life is a series of unconnected random events would be continually in a defensive stance. Or, if convinced that life was actively hostile, or actively (if we could put it that way) meaningless, or actively benevolent – surely you can see that each attitude would produce differences in interpretation, and that different interpretations provoke different responses which in turn elicit differences in the next sequence of events.
Yes, I can see that. I don’t know that I have ever drawn it quite that way in my mind.
If a hurricane blows through, are you responsible for the lost palm fronds? Yet, if the hurricane blows through and you have left the lawn furniture out, and a chair smashes a window, are you blameless? Your attitude toward the world implies your attitude toward your place in the world, and that attitude has consequences. When the hurricane arrives, you have some responsibility for what it finds, because you have had some ability to shape or reshape it, ahead of time.
And the point is not to avoid hurricanes – as that is beyond our scale – but to prepare for them.
No, the analogy breaks down. Preparing for them is a side-effect; that isn’t what we mean here. We mean, what you can do is work on yourselves; what you cannot do is assure that all will be peace and prosperity, and John F. Kennedy will not be killed, nor Abraham Lincoln, and your own days will not be troubled.
I get that. Again Emerson’s “marching off to a pretended siege of Babylon” after “raising my siege of a hencoop.” Or Thoreau’s mention of “cowards who run away and enlist.”
It is usually easier to aim one’s discontents and outrages and aspirations outward rather than inward.
And I hear an implied caveat: Don’t take this to mean implied condemnation or commendation of a public life or of concentration on external affairs.
That’s right. What you do doesn’t really matter. How you do it (mindfully or otherwise) will be found to matter a great deal.