Friday, October 4, 2024
6:10 a.m. I was thinking, as I lay drowsing on the recliner after feeding the cat, that recently I have had to explain two things about myself, one being asthma and fear, the other being the difference between reputation and accomplishment. I don’t think I’ve done either explanation adequately. but the process has added clarity to my thinking. And even as I pondered, I got a bit more clarity. But I don’t know that the subject is sufficiently fascinating to warrant a conversation.
[TGU:] but how do you know that? You may add in your third area of pondering, how people have psychology inside-out because they think of the 3D/non-3D relationship wrongly.
Can’t even remember the example that had come to mind, though I remember the conclusion.
Sure you can. It was people paying attention to stray thoughts as Christine mentioned on Wednesday.
Oh, yes. So I take it you do think this is of sufficient interest.
Do you have something more important to do at 6 a.m.?
Do the three things have something in common other than how things can be misunderstood or inadequately explained?
They are about life, aren’t they?
Well, I don’t mind putting in the effort, so I guess we’ll see. Fear, concern, and confusion?
Maybe go there first and find out at the end what the theme was?
[Since most of the following is me and not an alternation with TGU, I’ll leave it all in Roman, as easier to read in large blocks than italic.]
[Me:] Okay. Working backwards.
Fear.
Yesterday Robert Cornett and I were talking and he mentioned that asthma attacks – being unable to breathe – must be terrifying, and I had a bit of a time clarifying that that isn’t exactly right. The thing is, when you have dealt with a thing since you were two years old, you just can’t be afraid in the same way you were as a child. How many times can you be terrified of the same thing you’ve gone through hundreds of times before? Tiresome, oh yes. Painful sometimes, debilitating sometimes, aggravating and even perplexing sometimes, yes, to be sure. But after a certain point you know that you aren’t likely to die of it, and you would almost be pretending if you were afraid of something that you were pretty sure wasn’t going to happen. Instead, you might easily feel impatience, dread, weariness, maybe anger, resignation – a whole lot of possible reactions. But it isn’t exactly fear.
However, complicating that, you may easily feel panic. Panic that you might die? No, panic that you can’t get your next breath, and that this might go on and on.
Sounds like the same thing, and sometimes I can make the difference clear to people and sometimes – usually – not. But as I was explaining the difference, I realized one aspect of it that I don’t remember ever fully seeing before. When you are fighting for your next breath in what we may call , for the moment, immediate-panic-mode, you are right there fully in the moment. You have no attention for daydreams or memories or coming attractions. You are held right there, and not for just a moment or two, but for however long it lasts. When I realized that, I thought, “Hmm, and that is good practice for when you can breathe.”
Now, at other times you may be in attention-but-not-panic mode, where your breath is coming regularly, but not unconsciously. You have to pay attention to it, not because you want to but because the situation is there: something like having a headache, I suppose, a continual presence that is more than background noise but less than a shrieking jangle that prevents you from thinking of anything else. This state may go on for hours if you don’t happen to have the medicines to stop it. I well remember so many nights as a boy, sitting on the side of the bed, swaying my body forward and back, fighting for every breath, only without an sense of possibly losing the fight; it’s just that each breath was an effort. I spent time reading, moving the book as I moved, to keep it at the same focal depth.
(And that is how I developed the habit of being in the 3D but escaping into the non-3D – the mental world – pretty deliberately, pretty simultaneously having my conscious awareness both here and there. I should ask Dirk: I’ll bet his situation was similar, except that his would have been continuous while mine was sporadic.)
So, did asthma bring fear? Not in the way people would assume, and not in any way that is easily explained. It also brings gifts, though you may have to look closely to see them.
Reputation and accomplishment
Then there is the difference between fame (reputation) and achievement. This one can be hard to explain too, for a different reason. In my experience (though perhaps I am misinterpreting), I see people very ready to discount and disbelieve certain things, in a way that would be highly insulting normally. Their disbelief amounts to saying that you are either lying or are acting out of unconscious motivations. This, from people who would take your honesty and awareness for granted in almost any other direction.
(Come to think of it, this is what happens to anyone whose experience is sufficiently outside the expected range, when they try to communicate it to someone who hasn’t had and cannot imagine having the experience, be it a UFO encounter, or an out-of-body or a communication with someone who is deceased.)
To me, it seems simple. I am 78 years old. What possible advantage could fame do me? If I knew that I would be famous after I died, again, what possible difference could it make? But to know that I had (or hadn’t) achieved, is something else entirely. And, writing this, I realize that something I take for granted may be the unspoken explanation.
I have lived mostly without feedback. Until recently – the past 20 years or so – no one who didn’t know me well and in person could have had any idea what I was doing. (For that matter, I didn’t have much idea what I was doing. Mostly when I was doing something, I was thinking I was doing something else.)
I have lived my life mostly within my own little bubble, more like Thoreau’s life than Emerson’s. I never linked fame and achievement in my mind. My very first book won a prize – and then was stifled by a legal challenge we should have fought but didn’t. But the achievement was writing the book. The recognition was decoupled from it right at the beginning. It was a bitter experience, but perhaps it was just as well in not leading me to expect external success. You can’t live your life seeking the approval of others and still do your own work. If you work and the approval comes, well and good, but either way, you did the work.
Of course the real question is, did you do the work? Did you do it as well as you could do it? Will it meet recognition? That is, will it be effective and useful? But these questions have no intrinsic connection to recognition of the author. If you have written Walden and none of your fellow townsmen (except Emerson, of course) recognize its quality, does that mean anything to Walden? If you are or are not recognized as the author, does that affect what you did? These are famous people as examples, but what else can I use? The point is, the man is one thing and the work or lasting effect is something different, and confusing the two is – well, is confusion.
Just as there is a radical difference between fear of death and panic over the circumstances of living in that particular moment, so there is a difference between seeking approval or validation, on the one hand, and finding that you have received it, on the other. What happens to the author is trivial next to what happens to his literary children. Even this doesn’t get it, but that’s enough time spent on it.
The third confusion was about the way people think things are, and the actual facts. But this isn’t easy either, as to make the argument is to assume for the moment that there is any one way of seeing things. Perhaps a better way to say it is that there is a more helpful way to see things and a less helpful way, depending on what you want to do. If you want to understand our mental world while we’re in 3D, I suggest we reverse the usual concepts.
But I suddenly realize, I’m out of energy. Maybe I’ll come back to this later on or on another day. I’ve been at this an hour, and I’ve been doing all the work. Themes?
[TGU:] “Drawing distinctions, perhaps.
Maybe so.