Sunday, March 17, 2024
10:50 a.m. Hard to figure out how to begin. Wondering why I’m still here, how much longer, if there’s anything to accomplish, etc., nothing new there. Beyond that, no interest in doing anything, even leaving the house. Is this going anywhere? I am of course in mind of Rita asking herself why she was still there. Now I am in the same position. Reading doesn’t seem to be much of a life, and I’m pretty well finished with writing, I guess.
Guys?
You are still the only “you” around. When you are no longer in a given 3D moment, who can look out on the world from your point of view?
Nobody and so what?
Yes, in a way “so what” and of course every life comes to an end. But what if your observation is required (or anyway desired) for a specific series of events?
But, is it?
This is a tangled subject.
Tell me about it! How about untangling it some?
You never had a clear view of your life going forward. In general, people don’t. Too much clarity would actually restrict your effective range of maneuver.
So why change now, is that it?
Don’t slip into an assumption of being acted upon rather than also acting. You are not guinea pigs, you are explorers: What you explore is partly a matter of your context, partly a matter of your decisions and their consequences.
But we usually know when we’re on the beam, don’t we?
Do you? Think how many times you sleepwalked into your future, when clearer insight might have made you less certain, or let’s say less able to follow non-rational but critical paths.
Okay, granted. I never claimed to know what I was doing, or why I was impelled to do it. But let’s talk specifically about this end of my life, when I presumably am playing out the clock rather than preparing for some new adventure.
If you wish to define it that way.
Meaning, we never know. Well, it is highly irritating. It is one thing to live in faith, as I think I do. It is something else to live in deliberately produced obscurity [that is, lack of clarity; opacity], as it sometimes seems I am doing.
Do you remember when you hungered and thirsted to know the future?
A good part of my youth.
Would it have helped or hindered?
How can I know? It didn’t happen.
Au contraire. It did happen but not in a way you have recognized until just this moment.
That’s very interesting. I knew I would run for Congress in 1974. Knew it years before, though it made no sense. That was knowing the future but it felt like waiting for the time to roll around until I could do it.
Was that predestination or free will?
I see your point, it wasn’t either, in a way. It was being drawn to an outcome.
How you ran, whether you ran (for you might have looked at the odds and said no) were up to you. But the running itself was as if set in stone, not because it was predestined (though it could look like that) but because it was a major rock in the stream that was your life. If it were not to be encountered, it would have to be avoided, but it could not be ignored.
I’m not sure I have the sense of it. How is something that must be dealt with different from predestination?
So long as you look at this through 3D logic – past, then present, then future, created sequentially – it will tangle. Look at it as we do, that all the potentialities of your life, of everyone’s life sharing your time, are inherent from the creation. Seen that way, it becomes a matter of current and steering and storms and drift and propulsive power. A canoeist exercises his free will in going down the river, but freewill cannot move the canoe outside the river or to another time. Life does provide portages, it is true, but fewer than you might think.
So, a salient point in Rita’s life was her questioning of you in 2001-2002, unbeknown to herself ahead of time?
Yes, but don’t think external tasks are necessarily the important thing. How do you know but that something you will assimilate, something you will put together mentally and never mention, may be an important thing in your life?
I feel like at this point I am to sigh and say, “Living in faith, okay I can do that.”
Suppose you didn’t. where would be the advantage of frustration or anger or worry or indignation or any reaction other than living in faith that all is well? Wouldn’t it be the equivalent of pretending to affect world affairs by your reaction to the latest news?
Point taken. I get the feeling there is more to be said, but I’m finished for the moment. Our thanks as always.
1 p.m. Typing this up, I am aware that this barely scratches the surface. Perhaps others will have comments or questions that will lead to something.