As I look back on my life, it seems to me I didn’t stay conscious enough. I rarely turned the inner spotlight on me, except as a sort of non-introspective self-awareness. I was there, but not thinking about what I was doing or reacting to. I couldn’t learn from experience, because I wasn’t altering my reactions from having thought about past reactions.
You might consider yourself a society without regulation. Rather than by-laws, it’s always ad hoc adjustment. “How do I feel right now?” This isn’t necessarily a fault or a virtue, but it certainly opens some doors and closes others. Of course everyone’s bounds are different in nature and extent. One travels extensively abroad, another travels extensively inward. And beyond this difference, which is still an internal difference regardless of the fact that it plays out in the outer world, there is a difference in what one does with what one lives. So take Bob Friedman, quietly influential over a long lifetime and Colin Wilson.
The commonality being that they liked to think about psychic experience but didn’t particularly want to have it.
Not quite. They wanted to maintain. Both Bob and Colin were thinkers in a way that you are not. They reflected. They pondered. They learned from experience. This doesn’t mean that what they learned necessarily was right; we are concerned here with the nature of their process. Someone considering something new in the light of past conclusions may end up merely adjusting new perception to not contradict older conclusions. But on the other hand, they may learn something. Different ways of living produce different crucibles within the 3D crucible. So if Bob and Colin are intending to live their lives from a stable platform that will allow them clear observation (which is one way of looking at their lives), you cannot expect them to want to jettison that stable platform just when things get interesting. Instead, by not moving, they get front-row seats. And from those front-row seats, they were able to describe the view to others. You by contrast are more like a set of water wings on a lake, or sometimes a river, occasionally on the open seas. What you know is an idea of yourself shaped by your reaction to your surroundings. What you chiefly have to report is your own process, your own journeying.
As time has gone by, I have had a greater sense of my own journey being all I had to offer by way of instruction or commentary or even encouragement.
You share with Colin the reporting of what you think and do – in other words, your experience. Bob did not do that. You share with Bob your own vivid intense inner life, poorly communicated, often misunderstood or unsuspected. The three of you delighted in assisting others. Of the three of you, Bob was perhaps the most self-aware, in that he did not live in a continual whirl of mental and physical activity like Colin, and did not lose his inner compass by throwing himself into new circumstances (inner or outer) like you. He was the quietest of the three of you. And Colin was the one who made the greatest impact, by far, in the span of his life.
James Joyce said history was a nightmare from which he was struggling to wake up. I sometimes think my life is a nightmare, or anyway a dream, from which I am struggling to wake up.
That isn’t quite what you mean. It is more like, your drift is the lack of direction from which you are struggling to become aware enough to overcome. But, you see, the very thought of thinking about it drives you to think of doing something else.
Yes, I recognize that persistent drive to escape. It feels like self-sabotage.
Think of it as true north, and see where that brings you.
Huh! You mean, maybe what I’m seeking is the very thing I must not find?
No, what you are doing is not at all what you think of yourself as doing. That’s a very different thing.
So, in practical terms, what can I (ought I) do?
If toward the end of your life you can live a summing-up, it will be well.