Monday, August 19, 2024
6:05 a.m. Okay, Jon, what shall we talk about? Are we going to contend between ourselves, as Wilbur and Orville did, thrashing out intellectual puzzles without ill feelings resulting? Is that why I have been rereading in my books on the Wright Brothers?
It’s your life. Don’t ask me!
But I just did.
They argued highly technical questions and benefited from their different opinions and points of view. One man couldn’t have done what they did. They were highly intelligent, and had all the intellectual tools they needed, and they had the mechanical aptitude that let them test theory with practice – but the main advantage of their partnership was that it prevented either of them from going off on a wrong track, reinforcing each mistake with another based in the same wrong notions, as happened to many solitary inventors and experimenters. They challenged each other, continually, and they didn’t take it personally. Their emotional bond was so strong that they could get mad about arguments without getting mad at each other. There’s a big difference.
Ah, and that’s a model for people talking to the other side?
Well, if you look at it, you’ll see that self-deception has always been a major pitfall in such communication. And people working together are prone to quarrel for various reasons. The Wright Brothers are a model of productive cooperation, turning friction into usable energy.
But even brothers are rarely as close as they were.
The cooperation is the model, not their biographies. People will work best when they keep in mind that even heated disagreements don’t have to interfere, but can be made to work; and nothing works better than love (that is, expansion) rather than fear (a certain type of zero-sum competition).
I get the “feel” of the engineers small group. Five people, all engineers professionally, all instinctively cooperative, as best I can tell. I haven’t seen signs of heated contention, but on the other hand a virtual meeting once a week isn’t the same as living in the same house year after year all your lives.
It might be a productive experiment if people were to choose sides over a question and argue it as strenuously as possible, not seeking victory but seeking clarity.
Such as the “individual soul v. collection of threads” question?
Any question that was real to the participants. Not much point in going through the motions: Go after clarity on something that genuinely puzzles you.
Various groups would have various questions, and the answers between them might not gibe, of course.
Treat that as the Wrights did, as the font of further questions. But you have to start with what really interests you, what you really want an answer to.
And of course that is going to differ one by one as well.
So what’s yours? What is the one thing front and center in your mind at the moment?
Personal or cosmic?
Either, not that there’s any difference. Just as you find yourself reading for no reason, and then you see the reason that was there all along, so your question that seems to be theoretical will be seen to have personal aspects, and the question that seems to be personal will be seen to have wider application. You know this; you’ve been preaching it for years. So what is your question of the moment?
Actually, I guess it is, What is going to happen to me? I live in faith, but another word for faith is lack of knowledge. I know it is useless to want to know, but I do wonder.
Naturally. Will your body hold up? What happens when you experience a critical failure? What of the million critical consequences? And you know you can’t know the answers and you know it doesn’t matter.
I don’t know that I can’t know, actually. Swedenborg knew in advance what day he would die. If one person experiences something, I suspect that others may and perhaps do. So, I don’t know that I can’t know the future – and in that, I haven’t made any progress from when I was a kid and desperately wanted the ability to know the future.
Yet you know there isn’t any what you call “the future.”
All right maybe let’s start with that. Everything the guys have told me over 25 years rings true, and that ought to amount to: All futures exist and it depends which one you choose by your actions. Understood, of course, is that our choosing isn’t, mostly, conscious. We can choose an attitude, we can choose to believe that All Is Well, but we can’t choose what is going to happen. So why do we sometimes feel like there is a “the future”?
Which question are you asking? How things are? Or why they seem a certain way?
I hadn’t realized that they are two questions, though it’s clear enough now. Answer either one, and we’ll go from wherever it takes us.
It may help if you make a general rule: Go with the most practical question, the easiest one to approach.
That’s what the Wrights did. They broke the overall question into specifics and tackled them one by one. But can we do that – can I do that – when I don’t know what I’m driving at? Wilbur and Orville wanted to learn how to fly. That defined the overall context for every problem that arose. What is my aim here?
And that is a good question and you might have started there. Shall we look at it?
If we can.
For you and for others, this word of advice: Always be honest in private, and if the result isn’t suitable to be public, keep it to yourself. But it is hard enough to come to the truth without always being on guard lest you say too much.
I’d guess you had some professional experience with that.
Just a little! But it’s as true for psychiatrists as it is for their patients. More so, in fact, because we know more ways to hide from ourselves.
Okay, so what is my aim?
Now, don’t confuse yourself. The question needs clarity, and the process of bringing it to clarity will refine it, will orient you.
I seem to be blank. Maybe let this go as a discussion of process, and wait for the question itself to bubble up?
You can do that, but you’re wasting time. If you want to know, ask!
I’ve heard that somewhere.
Yes. So try it.
What is the front-and-center question in my life? It’s complicated.
Not complicated, complex. It won’t be a ten-word answer.
Okay, well, Am I misleading myself and others? Do I really know anything? Is that all amounting to anything? What do I do with the things we put together but didn’t publish?
And, deeper?
What about personal relationships? I am so alone. I have never been comfortable with people, or, no, not that, I have never really known how to relate to them. Or, not even that, I can relate to them, but usually not to their lives. We don’t move in sync.
Keep going.
Which of the ways I can see my life are correct and which are not? Was it a train wreck? A productive experiment? A getting-by? Did I do more good than harm?
And?
Oh yes, of course: Am I on a good track or should I change and if so how do it and toward what.
These are good preliminary questions, and you can publish them or keep them to yourself. And certainly we can talk with the veil of professional silence around us, any time you like.
Thanks, Wilbur. Till next time.