Friday, April 11, 2025
6:10 a.m. Two things Jon said require treatment at length: (1) Aspiration and finding the key to health, and (2) How to ask for the key.
Perhaps we can pursue that?
I said, not belief or belief in any rote system. It was to these that I began to oppose aspiration as a route to pursue, and it is with these as foils that we should pursue the matter.
You mean, I think, that thinking of aspiration as a contrast to belief or to rote will make the point clearer.
It is hard to say, “Yes, that is what I just said,” without it sounding like impatience. It isn’t; it is saying, yes, you got the sense of it.
Any course of action may usually be divided into three. In fact, you might make a rule of thumb: Conditions of duality are usually resolved by turning two into three.
Gurdjieff’s positive and negative and reconciling principles.
You can see that two is a tug-of-war, and three is a reconciling into a system.
I do. What would be deadlock in two becomes synthesis in three. So aspiration is the reconciling principle between belief and rote?
I said it would take a while, but we’re already on our way, I see. Yes, you could look at it that way. But that’s a pretty bold leap, and I can guarantee that you’ve left a lot of people behind. Not everybody, but a lot.
Well, I’m willing to go slower. You drive the argument and I’ll drive the pen.
Belief in a set of rules, belief in miracles, belief in possibility. That’s one way to look at it. But let’s restate it in terms of attitudes, of preferences, or let’s say of inclinations by temperament.
Some people believe in rules. They follow cookbooks, and, in the absence of a cookbook, are inclined to disbelieve in the possibility of producing a result in any organized, predictable way. To this kind of temperament, if it cannot be reduced to rules, it is problematical at best, and certainly cannot be relied on.
Many people’s reaction to ESP, etc.
Exactly. If it gets established to the point of an understandable predictability, they will have no objection to recognizing it, but until then, it doesn’t exist as much more than a rumor, to them.
Now, there’s no use decrying such a mentality. Like everything else that exists, it has its place, or it wouldn’t exist. But you can see that in the current state of affairs, such people cannot obtain health through faith-healers, say.
But if they happen to, their belief-system crumbles.
Not exactly. If their temperament is such that they must have rules, they perhaps improvise rules that seem to fit the new facts to be accommodated. They don’t usually become a different type of person; rather, they adjust their inventory of known or probably facts.
By contrast, every religion has an underpinning of miraculous occurrences – healings not the least of them – and many people are convinced by miracles who could never put their faith in a set of rules.
Me, for one.
Well, you in a way. You are open to miracles from a certain direction, but not from others. And in fact that’s a good example of aspiration.
I don’t get it yet.
Let’s first finish with belief. Devotees of strong enough faith can move mountains, just as promised, only it would never occur to them to try to move mountains; moving their own lives and the center of their lives is enough.
Miracles happen. Those of a certain temperament are not only able and even anxious to believe in them, they thereby enable them. (That is, they make them possible by providing fertile ground.) Those of other temperaments not only do not experience miracles, they actively resist experiencing miracles.
PSYCOP.
Yes, that’s an example in a secular field. Strong anti-faith, that cares less that things be this way or that, but cares passionately that they not be one certain way.
You have to understand, miracles as a psychological phenomenon are based in a strong belief in a contrary mundane reality. If you casually believed that it is possible for the dead to come back to life, you wouldn’t be particularly startled if you saw it happen. But if you were firmly convinced that the dead never return to life, such a premature resurrection would be paradigm-shattering – yet would also confirm that the world is normally the way you were thinking of it.
I see that. The stronger the belief in what looks obvious, the more startling an exception is, and at the same time, that exception is placed firmly in the realm of the ordinary, only it is the exception that they say proves the rule.
And these two temperaments could be looked at as antagonists that could not be reconciled, but then there is aspiration.
The joker in the deck? Trickster?
If you must. Not a very scientific way to look at it, but then that in itself illustrates the point. There is a temperament that isn’t quite rule-based, and doesn’t quite have a firm enough belief in a set of governing concepts to be startled by miracles. It is, let’s say, fluid, ready to flow with the slightest tilt of the playing-field.
But only in certain directions.
More like, not in certain directions. It’s a fine distinction but an important one.
Oh, I see it, all right. The way I put it implies a more constricted flow than the way you put it.
You can do better than that.
To say, “only in certain directions” implies, most of the circle is off-limits but there are a few possibilities. To say, “not in certain directions” implies that most of the circle is available, with only a certain part ruled off-limits. A nuance, but, I see, an important one. We aren’t as much closed-off in general as we are closed-off to a few possibilities. I for instance would refuse to believe in any strictly mechanistic or deterministic interpretation of things. Somebody else might refuse to believe in any supernatural or superstitious interpretation.
That’s right.
Well, this hasn’t been particularly difficult or complicated, but I can see why you wanted to consider it separately rather than as an aside. And I guess we should save “How to look for the key” for another time, an essay of its own. Thanks, Jon.
Call this “aspiration” if you wish.
At this last minute I am getting a qualm that suggests we didn’t deal with this thoroughly enough.
What we said will serve, and if occasion calls for further explanation, it can come at its own time.
Okay.