The “doing” and the “having done”

Sunday, June 16, 2024

4:20 a.m. The year got off to a bang-up start, but now we are stalled. Some practical advice, gentlemen?

Since when do you take practical advice?

I know. Well, something theoretical, then?

Not much point in it: It would be like telling Cayce to slow down, or telling anybody stubborn to do what doesn’t match their inner nature.

Fighting fate?

There is no more one fate than there is one future. A moment’s thought should convince you of that. People have a range of fates as they have a range of futures. Not unlimited – implied in the word “range” is boundaries on either end – but wide enough to encompass all your possibilities.

I can’t become a bird, for instance, nor an athlete, nor many things prior choices and the accumulation of time have foreclosed. Doesn’t the range narrow severely as we age?

It narrows: It doesn’t quite close. But the narrowing isn’t the unfortunate necessity you are thinking of it as. It is a necessity with pleasant and unpleasant causes and effects. If you are shaping a bowl on the potter’s wheel, as you approach an aesthetically pleasing shape, your options narrow. Is this an unfortunate necessity, or merely a natural part of the creative process?

If you’ve been molding a bowl, at some point it’s too late to reshape it into a pitcher, or a teacup.

And sometimes your efforts produce failure. Not every throwing results in a success.

To put it mildly!

You could look at it as Omar the tentmaker did, as God being the potter, not you.

I’ll try to find the verse in the Rubaiyat, and enter it here it I post this.

[And suddenly one more impatient cried –

“Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?”

…

None answered this; but after Silence spake

A Vessel of a more ungainly Make:

“They sneer at me for leaning all awry;

What! Did the Hand then of the Potter shake?”

 

“Why,” said another, “Some there are who tell

Of one who threatens he will toss in Hell

The luckless Pots he marred in making – Pish!

He’s a Good Fellow, and ‘twill all be well.” ]

There is no blame for failure, and perhaps the merit for success is misallocated. Your lives are more than the truncated segments you see in 3D. Even your intuitions of an afterlife are somewhat shaped by your 3D expectations. You may think one way, and still unconsciously expect another way.

The accounting won’t be based the way we think of it, you mean.

You naturally judge your lives by what you know, which is 3D data. But from beyond 3D, the picture looks different. It is something like handicapping, in racing.

You mean we take into account the invisible factors we had to contend with, as well as whatever we in 3D were aware of.

Yes, and that isn’t exactly a free pass. If we were judging your life as a separate unit (and no reason we shouldn’t, if we care to; it isn’t like a trial with consequences), we would also take into account the many supportive influences and opportunities you might have made effective and didn’t. We wouldn’t only say, “Well, let’s cut him some slack, he was contending with X, Y, and Z”

As you keep saying, we never have the data to judge.

You never have the data to make a definitive judgment. You can always make provisional ones, and in practice you usually must.

I get the sense sometimes that we re-run our lives until every option in the possible range has been examined. I go back to that image of reality as an ever-changing light-show, with everything being affected by everything else, changing as other things change.

Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence has been misunderstood, and perhaps he didn’t quite understand his own intuitive hit.

So what of us here, now? We do our best but if nothing is permanent, what’s the use?

Isn’t that the question that obsessed your early life? Didn’t you have to proceed against a background chorus saying, “useless, useless”? And don’t you know that life is impermanence – which ought to tell you that there’s nothing wrong with impermanence?

I suppose the moment-by-moment creation itself has to be the point.

You need to realize – you, meaning all of you in 3D – that the doing is real, and in a sense permanent. The having done is less real, and is certainly not permanent even as it appears more permanent than the doing.

You’re saying, the living moment is real; the record of it is less so.

Someone judging your life from the outside, as of course they would have to do from outside, would see only what was done, to the extent that there was a record of it. They wouldn’t see the cross-currents that led to the actions, but even it they could see them, they would still see only what was done, not the doing.

I read of George Marshall’s life and I read what he did and we get some intimations of why he did it, and intimation of how he conducted himself, his character pluses and minuses. But of course nobody can know what it was like to be Marshall.

No, not really. You are mysteries to each other, regardless whether you realize it. But this goes for yourselves, as well! You are to some degree a mystery to yourself, because you know only what it looks like from inside (rather than from outside as others see you), and you do not have access to the parts of yourself of which you are not conscious. How could you have? But you do the best you can, and whatever you do fits into what everyone else does, and as far as 3D vision goes, you see it as a fixed pattern, a thrown pot. From outside, looking at the never-ending eternal living present moment, it looks different. There, we’re back to the light show, and that thrown pot is only one possibility within whatever range of possibilities exists for you.

The practical upshot of this is that just as there is no use crying over spilt milk, so there is no use worrying that you’re going to spill milk. You probably will, and so what? The important thing, paradoxically enough, is less your result than your intent, because the result is a “having done,” and the intent is a “doing.”

Even though we may change intent.

The new intent will be the alive, active, enduring thing. It is paradoxical, as we said, but what seems least permanent, least tangible, is actually what is the real in your lives. The deadwood you accumulate as you live, deciding, is just that, dead wood. Outside of 3D you will not care who won Little Big Horn or Wounded Knee or whatever: Those are all “having done” situations. What you will care about is the reality of everyone concerned, none of which can be put into a historical record.

Sounds an awful lot like, “All is well, all is always well.”

It does, doesn’t it.

Noe of this addresses the storms and doldrums of our inner weather while we are experiencing the long living in 3D.

We mean this in the kindest, most helpful way: Everybody has to make his own way in the world, emotionally no less than physically. We can’t give more direct help without interfering with your life, because life is about deciding. We can and do advise. We can and do encourage this or discourage that. But it is always up to you , what your life is going to be. Nobody can live your life for you, and “living your life” is much more about perceiving and deciding than it is about anything external. When your life is over, do you think you are going to care if you kept your car washed? But you are going to care how you related to others, and – hear this! – how you related to yourself.

Is that a topic for another session?

It could be.

I think this is a good time to stop, then. Till next time, and as always, our thanks for all of this.