Wednesday, September 18, 2024
5:20 a.m. Jon, let’s go to town, assuming you have something queued up.
Don’t you have questions queued up?
Yesterday we heard that you are finding that whatever you wanted to know, you can find out instantly, together with branches of knowledge you didn’t know existed. And can you pass that along to us?
As you know, the better the question, the better the answer, and as you heard among yourselves, clarifying the question is a way to orient yourself toward the answer.
I will include yesterday’s drumming here.
You said: “The thing to remember as you go along is that life has its own plan, and it always complements yours – everyone’s. You wouldn’t think so, you’d think there had to be conflict, but maybe life includes conflict and uses conflict, and so sees nothing wrong with it. But if you trust that life’s plans and the individual’s plans dovetail somehow, doesn’t that amount to trusting life? As you are always saying.”
I said: “I’m getting practice this week,” referring to my inability to get Clear Rate Communications to provide the telephone service I paid for.
You: “But your very patience with the telephone situation amounts to not considering a major inconvenience as something out of left field that has nothing to do with you.”
Me: “Not much point in getting aggravated, since I can’t do anything about it.”
“But in the past you would have gotten aggravated. It is because you are seeing emotions in the way the guys described it, that you can sense that the external hooks up with the internal somehow, even if you can’t see how. And this is true for anybody. The less you take things personally, the easier the ride.”
Can you say something on the subject of how life uses conflict and, I gather, approves of it?
Life includes everything, does it not? It doesn’t include only the things you approve, or I approve, or somebody else approves. And you’re talking of billions of people, billions of facets of the one gem. How can there not be conflict? But conflict doesn’t mean warfare necessarily. It can, or it can mean competition, or creative interaction or anything as simple as a marriage. Could it be possible for life to be unable to deal with itself?
I know I didn’t get that last sentence right. Again?
Life is going to cope with all aspects of life, necessarily. This is what is meant when you hear that you must not think yourself smarter than the universe. The way life proceeds may or may not please you. You may think it should be different, should be better, but yours – anyone’s – is always going to be a limited, partial, view. Vegetarians might wish that no one eat meat – presumably including all the carnivores who are not human – but life is not set up that way. Did life somehow forget something? Did it fail to live up to the standards of some of its constituent elements? No, if you look at it closely, you have to realize that life knows what it is doing.
But life includes us, thinking it shouldn’t be “red in tooth and claw.”
Yes, and that is one legitimate response to one’s view of how things are. The trouble is, all views are legitimate, emphatically including the ones you – anyone – may abhor. If it exists, nature has a use for it, and it doesn’t depend on our approving it.
Cannibalism?
You know full well that what is lumped under the word “cannibalism” includes many different motivations. Sometimes it is a ritual homage to the dead opponent. Sometimes it is a different sort of ritual, using the individual as a stand-in for the almighty, the Great Spirit, in the way that communion serves as a symbol of human participation in the divine via Jesus the divine man. Don’t forget – we’re always having to say this, but it’s important in order to keep you oriented – it is all mind-stuff, and therefore motivation is far more important than a given action itself.
That’s an interesting take on things. As I think about it, we see people like Hemingway and his hero Teddy Roosevelt, dedicated and prodigious hunters of animals, and regardless what we think of hunting, we remember that that isn’t all they were.
What you’re meaning is that you are all mixtures of elements that are a little different or a lot different from each other. Someone who admired Roosevelt as conservationist might deplore him as a hunter – yet in Roosevelt the qualities coexisted without friction. Contradictions stem from viewpoint. How can nature have a viewpoint less than everything? But a viewpoint that is everything cannot be a perspective – a single place from which to order everything else, as if that place were the ultimate importance and everything else was subordinate to the perspective it imposed.
I see what you’re saying. Where does this leave reformers?
An impulse to reform is as valid as an impulse to keep everything as it is. An attempt to shape human affairs more to the liking of someone is as legitimate as an attempt to warp it. As legitimate, not more so. And of course this is where we will lose some people.
You didn’t lose me, though. I can feel it. I have always had a push/pull relationship emotionally with reformers. On the one hand I may share their repugnance at something – racism, when I was a boy – but on the other hand there was always a stridency that gave me pause; it wasn’t balanced.
You sensed that it was too partial, too emotionally driven, to see things clearly.
I have usually seen things more than one way at the same time; it makes it impossible to go off whole-heartedly on crusades. But at the same time, I am usually criticizing myself for being unable to act, unable to even decide what I would like to see happen.
Yet, being one facet of the gem, you could not be impartial, nor is it given to people to be impartial. Your values are your viewpoint and your viewpoint is what you offer to the larger self. That’s why they keep saying, “You are here to choose.”
But seeing many sides of issues that others see more from one or another side makes for ineffectiveness.
So what? Maybe you weren’t born to be an executive, but an absorber of viewpoints, a synthesizer of oppositions. Maybe life needs a few of these too.
It can be hard to remember that external life isn’t any less evanescent than internal life. It seems so real, so out-there. It’s one thing to realize abstractly that it is “only somewhat real,” but another to experience it that was as we go along.
Life is as malleable as you want it to be. Only –
I know: “Which you?”
Correct. People live in the world according to very different ground rules, but the difference is not in the world but in themselves.
And that should be enough about conflict. It’s part of life. Deal with it. It is the “dealing with it” that is the point.
Thanks, Jon, more another time, I hope.