Life and aspiration

Tuesday, April 22, 2025

5 a.m. Ready for a conversation, no idea as to topics. As long as you are able to function that way, I’m willing to drive the pen. Jon?

You can’t come to it with half a mind, though.

I’ll center. … Better?

Better. Not that it bothers me, you understand, but it’s driving with the brakes on, trying to do this and letting other things go on in the background. You’d still get stuff, but it would be easily distorted; contaminated, you could say.

Yes, I got it.

Let’s talk about everyday life and lifetime aspirations.

I didn’t feel that coming. Okay, let’s.

There is always a tension between the two, and biographies and histories and even fiction usually underrate the friction implied in the situation.

We tend to smooth out the speed bumps and wrong turns, and see the longer path.

That, or tend to not see the living path as a path at all, and instead see a life as nothing but speed bumps and wrong turns.

Well, I’ve said for a long time, I look at my life from one direction and it is a slow-motion train wreck, and from a different direction it is a miraculous series of guided or anyway assisted events.

No, you say from that other point of view it looks like a miracle, which is closer to the real meaning. But that’s right; this is one way the tension between daily events and lifetime pathway may be experienced.

I see I haven’t really written down what we’re talking about. It was clear to me from your first sentence, but only intuitively. I’m not sure anybody will have the data to understand it logically.

Then let’s spell it out a bit. On the one hand you have life as you experience it moment by moment, and on the other hand you have life as it aims itself, as it finds its path. On the one hand, innumerable incidents. On the other, a flight-path determined by a succession of choices.

Not sure even that will do it.

You try, then.

Biographies and fiction try to describe a life by moving from one significant event to the next, like a series of still photos. What they don’t show – never could show – is the millions of utterly normal, undramatic moments that make up life as we experience it. Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, and every biography of Lincoln mentions that. Does any – could any – detail his waking up and washing his face and getting dressed and eating breakfast, and engaging in casual conversation, and doing all the tiny things that make up our lives? Do they – could they – show the unending swirl of thoughts, memories, dreams, reveries, fears, hopes, worries, that run through his mind as he does those little essential things? We experience our lives in excruciating detail, but no one could portray all that, and if someone did, nobody could read it.

And this is why it is easy to lose sight of your aspirations for how to be, as you live your life. Nobody could live life at a state of continual high tension. Peak moments, yes, but they are moments, not lifetimes. How many peak moments can even the most tumultuous life contain? Even Napoleon had to wake up and get himself ready for the day. He had to go to the bathroom and eat and rest and all manner of things as everyone does, and even that unbelievably industrious ambitious man could not live every moment as a peak moment. And on the other end of the scale are people who perhaps never have an unusual thought or do an unusual deed in their entire life. Everybody lives life minute by minute, and enough of it may be tedious, or painful. Amid all these humdrum moments, how do you hold on to your aspirations for yourself?

I don’t know, but people do.

Of course they do. So it is worth looking into what you call “the how of it.”

On a guess, I’d say our moment-by-moment living is done at the 3D level and our steering a course is done on a non-3D level. This, assuming that the non-3D component is less likely to be diverted by any one moment’s distractions.

That’s roughly true. Now let’s look more closely at the how of it. If you have two centers of attention, say –

Better might be, one directing the shop’s course and the other doing the actual steering.

Yes, that’s a good way to put it. So what we are doing here is looking at the interaction between the bridge and the helm. We want to look at the nature of that interaction.

We experience it, I guess, as life continually and guidance occasionally.

That’s one pattern. There are others. Plenty of people don’t experience – or rather, don’t realize that they experience – guidance at all. They feel totally at sea without a course or even a rudder. Others – relatively fewer, and not all admirable by your standards – may experience their life as all guidance, interrupted by mundane necessities. Many historical characters could be cited, including Hitler and de Gaulle, Napoleon, Napoleon III. Any “man of destiny” is likely to feel that he is a tool of a higher power, a higher cause. At the other extreme are saints, and reformers, and embodiments of benevolent intent. They may also experience the presence of guidance as over-mastering their ordinary life.

And I can see that some get ego-inflated like Nietzsche and others get more grounded, more humble in a way, like Jung.

Or Hitler versus Lincoln, or Mussolini versus George Washington, yes. But since most of our readers are not going to be world-historical individuals, what is the relevance to them?

Becoming clearer about the difference between captain and helmsman?

More like this:

• Everyone is both captain and helmsman. This is one more aspect of life as a compound being.
• People’s ability to discern guidance in their lives varies widely, not only between individuals but, within individuals, from one moment to the next.
• Jung carved on the stone [in his garden at Bollingen], “Asked or not asked, God will be there.” Who can live in 3D without an unbroken connection to non-3D? That doesn’t mean the connection is recognized.
• Life is choosing. But what bounds the area of choice? What sets the course, established the bias? What stops you (or allows you) as you wander from impulse to impulse?
• What does your life look like if you look at it this way: Non-3D = the source of your aspirations. 3D = everything else.

We often experience life as a tug of war between higher and lower. And I’m guessing where you are going with this is that once again the world’s theologies and scriptures and philosophies will give us valuable insights if we will allow them to, us reinterpreting them to see what light they shed on the things we are investigating, using a very different language.

If you’re exploring new trade routes, it’s probably better if you look at whatever old charts exist, even if they are in a foreign language or use a different grid system; even if they are charts put together by people you consider to be your enemies. Ignorance of the spiritual explorations of past generations is – ignorance. Worse if deliberate ignorance.

I get that in a way we have barely begun on this topic of life and aspiration.

We may or may not continue but certainly there is more to be said.

But my hour is up, and I can feel it. Thanks, Jon. Next time.