Saturday, August 5, 2023
5 a.m. I had this thought earlier and sketched it into my journal, thinking I might edit it to become a decent post. We’ll see.
I have been reading American Prometheus, a life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and, as always when I read biographies, I am comparing my qualities (as far as I know them) with those I am reading about. Even when I find large numbers of shared qualities, positive or negative, I now know better than to say “maybe that’s a past life!”
In the case of Oppenheimer it would be chronologically impossible, but take Thoreau, say, or Emerson, both of whom I not only admire but feel strong resonances to. It still has nothing to do with “past lives” the way people think of them.
But it may have everything to do with shared threads, and I think it does. For one thing, the shared threads idea hints at why we can resonate so strongly to some of someone’s traits and dislike others, or be indifferent to them. (I saw this strongly in my reaction to Hemingway, for instance.)
To the argument:
If you say “computer,” you actually refer to not one thing, not two, but three – but we almost always see it as one, or at most as two.
- All the pieces that go together to make a computer, from the case to the smallest electronic component. They all could have used to make something else, probably, but this is what they made, what they were needed for.
- The computer as a collection of these pieces. Assembled in a certain order, functioning in a particular manner, they are (in this view) not pieces, exactly, but pieces-as-part-of-a-whole, and, equally, the computer is not a unit, exactly, but a-unit-composed-of-many-interrelated-pieces.
- The computer as a unit, considered as it if were one thing, even though we know in the back of our minds that it is one thing made of many things. (Of what may that not be said?)
Usually, casually, of course when we hear or say “computer,” we are thinking of (3). Sometimes, particularly if something goes wrong, we may also see it as (2) or even as (1). But how often do we see it, or need to see it, as all three? Rarely.
Similarly, perhaps, we humans are:
- The strands that we comprise.
- The individual and strands, living together.
- The unit they forge during a lifetime.
Now suppose, when we see ourselves composed of strands, we are tempting ourselves into a wilderness of mirrors unnecessarily. Suppose, if we look at it another way, we will still see a very complicated picture (life is complicated, after all), but with a few glimpses of the underlying order.
Let’s start with three strands:
- X and
- Y and
- Z,
And let’s pretend that each of these strands is an original principle, never before incarnated, never before associated with any other. Then, let’s say they enter into three different 3D lives, two or even three at a time, giving new “units”:
- (X+Y)
- (X+Z)
- (Y+Z)
And perhaps, also,
- (X+Y+Z)
Bear in mind, the next time around, we have not only these four new “units” to draw from, but also the original three, which after all didn’t go anywhere. We could wind up with a “unit” comprising
- (X+Y)+(X+Z)+(Y+Z)
- (X+Y)+(X+Z)+(Y+Z)+A or B or C or all three, etc.
I don’t know what these equations would become in algebra, but I left algebra behind when I was 16, and good riddance.)
You can see that things are only going to get more and more complicated, and the possibilities greater, and the percentage of traits that can find scope to manifest during a given life relatively smaller (though perhaps absolutely larger).
If I understand them right, this is what the guys have been trying to tell us, all this time: what we are, how we function, why we are the way we are, why we have the ability (and, really, the responsibility) to choose what we are to become, why it matters, to us, to the world.
I don’t know, maybe all this is totally obvious, but it seemed worth saying.
But there’s more. Consider, all these threads (or strands; I don’t know that it matters which we call them) are alive, and continuing to do whatever it is we do outside of 3D as well as inside. Does this not suggest that we sometimes overhear things that have little or nothing to do with us?
I have become accustomed to thinking of the various strands as being the cause of some of the pulling and hauling we sometimes experience between (or even among) impulses. But what if sometimes our dreams or our stray thoughts or our daydreams or our abstract-but-compelling impulses are stemming not so much from thread X as from thread X in its ongoing life as part of some other person?
Stray thoughts, and certainly not conclusive or even particularly thought-out. Suggestive, maybe.