[This stems from a comment made on the Voyagers Mailing List.]
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
[First day of spring. Also the day Rita Warren died in 2008.]
9:25 a.m. Okay, guys, you said that reacting to life in any way but living in faith would be “the equivalent of pretending to affect world affairs by your reaction to the latest news.” Care to elaborate, and clarify? Don’t we affect the world by our reactions to thing, even distant things? The analogy is to prayer.
This is partly a linguistic tangle, as you suggested to your friend in the mailing group, but more, it is a misunderstanding of our intent. We might have expressed ourselves more clearly, and here is an opportunity to do so.
There is a difference between intent and reaction, between conscious decision and the playing-out of old tapes. And this is the key to many things.
How does one watch the TV news, or read the newspaper, or surf the news websites? For that matter, how does one relate to others in oral or written conversations centering on the news? How, makes a difference, because what seem to be the same thing may prove to be very different in nature and in effect.
Bullets?
Perhaps, or a numbered list, better.
- Impartial interest. You want to know what’s going on, just to know.
- Partisan interest. You feel that you have a stake in the outcome (not of course necessarily any material stake, but an interest, a commitment). You take sides.
- Outraged interest. You ascribe right and wrong, and root for the right and detest the wrong. This in turn subdivides into:
- Historical
- Ideological
- Emotional
- (Call it) logical connection
So, 1 is perhaps well grounded in facts, or perhaps not, but in effect you are sure you know what happened to bring this about.
2 is more the way a committed Communist intellectual would have parsed a situation through “dialectical materialism” or whatever. Events can only be seen through a consciously adopted filter (which may have become so automatic as to function invisibly.)
3 always roots for the underdog, or instinctively sees disturbances as threats to civilization, or in any way plays off of prejudice that is seen as analysis.
It is a little more complicated with 4. This is a sort of combination of the first three, or rather of some elements of each of the first three. It says, “This probably connects to that, and my reaction to that is already set, so that governs (shapes) my reaction to that.” It is a form of analysis, but one far from being as coldly logical as the thinker supposes.
That’s all on one side of the ledge. The other side is one’s intent.
That isn’t clear. I thought what you just listed was intent.
Hmm. We see that. Let us have a moment to process. The exposition is new to us, not only to you.
Hard to see how that can be, but okay. We’ll wait.
[Brief pause]
Let’s back up and start again from another angle.
The power to bless is the power to curse, as you know. Similarly, the power to heal is the power to harm. This is one reason why it may be considered a safety-valve that most people are not powerful healers. It is one of those abilities that is well served by being kept out of the hands of the ill-intentioned or even the careless. As people’s emotional maturity increases, as they learn to live in love in bad times as well as good, the ability may be safely spread more broadly.
Now, what is a person’s reaction to the news, if an emotional one, but intent to aid one side and harm another? Not consciously, perhaps, but it is much like rooting for one team over another, only with elevated stakes.
Well, if you hear that the X conflict has flared up again, your reaction may be tempered by many things. You may distrust the news you get; you may read more into what you hear, for good or bad reasons. You may accept what is given as fact. In any case, your emotional reaction may be rage or exultation or anything between. Or, you may be indifferent, or merely interested but no more.
Can you see that this is a relationship with variables at either end? On the one side, the information, on the other side, your reaction. (And we have not mentioned, nor do we want to consider here, how your reaction interacts with other factors in your life.)
All this is to say something pretty simple. Your reaction cannot directly affect what happened. Your sincerest wish could not get Kennedy un-killed. No partisan could by intent cause any event to un-happen. (We are not talking here about alternate time-lines. That is a different subject that would only add confusion in this context.)
But what your reaction can do, and does do – you might say must do – is add to the emotion on one or the other side of this ledger: bright or dark, love or fear, hope or despair. This is the effect you have, and it is not trivial.
So when we referred to people pretending to affect world affairs by their reaction to the news, we did not mean to say, “What you experience makes no difference,” nor “You and your reaction are trivial.” Rather we meant, there is a difference between what you think you are doing and what you are doing. You may think you are affecting one side of a conflict by cursing it. What you are doing is adding to the total of hatred and fear and darkness.
You see? You do not affect the situation itself, you affect the aura surrounding it.
That’s pretty clumsy. I think you mean, the 3D features of the situation are not affected: We can’t make a rocket miss its target, nor undo damage that has already been done, but we can affect the non-3D aspects by adding our efforts to whatever tug-of-war is going on.
That is an acceptable rephrasing. The argument is full of logical holes that we can’t fill. For instance, non-3D efforts certainly affect 3D conditions all the time. But what is important here is not making a complete and accurate statement – which is beyond us here – but providing a finger pointing to the moon.
This has been an interesting exercise. It feels like you were struggling. Is this because my own mental world didn’t provide you ruts to run in?
Partially. Any new way of seeing things presents difficulties. But partly it is a matter of us having to organize connections on the fly. We remind you, you have experienced this in the past.
Not very often, though. Mostly you have your scripts prepared plus you are pretty good at ad libbing. In any case, thanks as always. I suspect we will have to revisit the subject, and that if and when we do, it will flow more smoothly.
Well, we’ll see, won’t we?
Indeed we will.