Saturday, March 16, 2024
9:10 a.m. I figure it’s time for a chat with the guys. Nice to have enough energy again. So, boys, what’s on your mind?
Let’s briefly discuss Memory Lane, its uses and possibilities.
Discuss away.
Your poking into your past memories via journals and – especially – fictionalized recounting set into print long ago – offers you a time machine. Not only do you get an automatic correction of dates and sequence, you get vivid reminders of what you felt then, and you get vivid comparisons between what you concluded whenever you wrote what you now read and what strikes you from this vantage point so many years – decades – later.
And what was that? This: You are not the same person. (We should hope it is clear that this must apply to any and all, but it never hurts to make it plain.) In that sense, it is not a time capsule alone; it is also a time capsule opened by a different person than originally sealed it. We know you know on some level that you are not –
Well, maybe we’ve never said this explicitly.
I don’t think you did, no, at least not what I’m hearing so far. Proceed.
Horizontally (so to speak) you now know that you are not one but many, or, if you have done the work, are one made from many, although the many retain their separate existence.
But look at yourself vertically – that is, as you proceed through time during your years of life. You will see that here too you are not one but many. And it can be harder to make one out of the many than it is to make one out of the many strands.
We need a better focus on this. Horizontally, strands. Vertically, –?
The naming will somewhat define your understanding, so we will proceed carefully. If we were to say one version of you for every moment of awareness (or rather, for every moment lived, regardless how aware your 3D self was or was not), you might see that as a clear statement, but when you came to try to use it, what could you do with it? Let us say you are different at 3:35 p.m. one day than you are at 3:36. How can you really imagine in any useful way a life made up of hundreds of thousands of slightly different versions of yourself? Not everything that is true is also useful.
So how make the distinctions still true but also useful, useable?
Simplify, simplify, simplify.
There is really no alternative. The saying is, “The map is not the territory.” Of course not, it is a simplified representation. It is in the simplification that its usefulness inheres. Simplifying relationships makes plainer their relative positions. If one over-simplifies, one distorts beyond the value of usefulness, but until that point, the simplifying process is a clarificatory one.
Not sur about “clarificatory,” but I get your gist. Only, everybody is going to have a different dividing point between useful and oversimplified.
Certainly, but that’s true of everything. Individual judgments always differ. That’s one of the advantages your non-3D component derives from having 3D representatives.
Parallax.
Essentially. Now, to return to what we may call vertical community. What would be an acceptable level of simplification?
I suppose, most grossly, childhood, youth, young adult, middle age, old age, something like that.
Yes that is one way one could begin to learn one’s vertical components. So, a conference table or campfire or whatever, populated by the child you were, the youth etc., and – personalizing these abstractions – see what you can be learning from one another. This is one way, and we may say a very basic way. Basic, as in, easy to do, but limited in possibility.
I get that maybe we could set up (find?) representatives of who we were before and after certain turning points. Not sure how practical that would be, though.
“Practical” implies “for a certain end.” What end would you foresee?
Oh, I don’t know. Self-awareness, I suppose, what else can we call it?
Consider what you did in posting your articles on “Dave.”
They haven’t appeared yet, but okay.
You are a long way beyond that 23-year-old whose life was so brutally punctuated. By rereading old words you in effect brought together the “you” in the immediate event, the “you” who later wrote about it, and the “you” who has had a long lifetime ‘s experiences beyond that.
Now, this is difficult to say because it has so many elements.
Bullets, maybe?
- The strands active at any of those times.
- Interaction among them, outside of time.
- Emotions, thoughts, physical sensations, unconscious resonance from each player involved, that is, from each moment of time.
- Judgments and their interactions. What a 25-year-old sees, feels, decides will not necessarily mesh with a 50- or 75-year-old.
- Ongoing conclusions, not quite the same thing as judgments. “What’s the lesson in this? Where do I go from here?”
- Pass-forwards and pass-backs: In effect, telepathy among different moments of time. Unexpected insights; emotional flashbacks; seemingly disconnected memories and themes.
- All of this, remember, also going on among all your strands, each of which has its own life.
All these elements in play, all the time, mostly (necessarily) beneath your level of consciousness, if only because of the sheer volume of input it would represent. So when you revisit your past, you stir the pot.
Unless.
Oh, I hear it. And this is going to tie up a couple of loose ends, isn’t it?
Tie one, create two more. But yes. The “unless” is – unless in revisiting your past you insist on seeing it always the same way. You play the same tapes, you’d say. And this, as you immediately intuited, ties in with Life More Abundantly. Tell why in your understanding.
Life playing old tapes is in a rut. It is stuck. It clings to the sides of the sliding board, determined that, no matter what happens in the future, at least the past isn’t going to change. And good luck to that.
Life More Abundantly is all about increasing your room to maneuver, broadening the amount of your life that is under your control. Or, no, not “under your control,” that gives the wrong idea. Let ‘s say, it broadens the scope for you to shape your life, past, present and future.
It is so clear to me, though still mostly beyond words. We are meant to widen our scope, not in pursuit of self-aggrandizement, but to function well as part of the larger organism of which we are a part. When I read Colin’s Mind Parasites fable, it resonated because he was saying what I hadn’t known I knew: Our lives are not essentially trivial, accidental, meaningless. Our possibilities are real but not obvious. But even as I put this into writing, it loses its noumenal quality and becomes mere words. Doesn’t matter, it’s still true.
Vertical communities, as well as horizontal. Thanks, guys.