Not so individual after all
Speaking of time and space and separation and delayed consequences was to lay the groundwork so that you may see more clearly that there are other ways of seeing us than as individuals.
So You Think Your Life Was Wasted (7)
There isn’t any “there”!
What I’m attempting to convey is so simple! So simple that when I do get the sense of it across, it is as though I haven’t said anything. People’s response tends to be, “well sure and so what?” In a way, that’s a perfect response, but in a way it is a misunderstanding – a lack of comprehension. There isn’t any “there” as opposed to “here.” It is all here (and it is all “now,” but we’ll get to that). Sometimes I want to keep repeating, “Just because you’ve heard it before doesn’t mean you understood it! Just because it is a familiar sounding idea doesn’t mean you are getting what is being sent.”
So You Think Your Life Was Wasted (6)
Illusions of time, illusions of space
Separation in space produces the illusion – or perhaps it would be better to say the condition – of separation, of individuality, of non-belonging, of difference, in a way that would not be possible otherwise. The guys upstairs once said that there is separation non-physically in a way but not as it is in the physical world. They suggested, as a rough analogy, that we think how our world would be if we were all continuously and unpredictably teleporting though both time and space. Nothing would seem as solid as definite or as sequential to you as everything does now. (It is only an analogy but not so bad a one.)
Deriding today’s idols
John Anthony West derides what he calls the Church of Progress. Me too. I am really tired of people pretending they are profound when in fact they are merely sheep following trends. The trend of the past tiresome century, and this one to date, is to regard religion as superstition, as if blind faith in “progress” or in “science” were anything but superstition.
A friend’s comments since I posted this reminds me that I should make clear that of course I did not mean that everyone who rejects religion does so only because it is fashionable to do so – merely that it is the fashion to do so, and the sheep do go that way. As to creeds, I believe it was Jung who said that the gods never reinhabit the temples they once abandon. Similarly, the old formulaic Christianity (and Judaism, and Islam, and Buddhism, and Hinduism, I would argue) is not something we can or should go back to; however, it (whichever one we were raised in) is likely part of what we step off from.
This piece, via my brother who called it to my attention a while ago, from The New York Times http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/god-talk/?emc=eta1 .
God Talk
Stanley Fish
In the opening sentence of the last chapter of his new book, “Reason, Faith and Revolution,” the British critic Terry Eagleton asks, “Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?” His answer, elaborated in prose that is alternately witty, scabrous and angry, is that the other candidates for guidance – science, reason, liberalism, capitalism – just don’t deliver what is ultimately needed. “What other symbolic form,” he queries, “has managed to forge such direct links between the most universal and absolute of truths and the everyday practices of countless millions of men and women?”
So You Think Your Life Was Wasted (5)
Connecting to other parts of ourselves
Back when I was still new to all this I discovered John Cotton, a “past life” of mine living in Virginia in the 1700s. Eventually I “retrieved” him, which it seems to me amounts to my having lifted myself by my own bootstraps. I was told later that I was gradually assembling the whole party of those known to me, drawing them closer to my everyday mind, which would pay off for me – as it would for anybody who did it – by increasing my range. After I got a handle on those closest to me in temperament, disposition, the era and geography, I could use them to help me move farther afield.
The unsuspected value of reading
The points of view I retrieve from talking to the other side are sometimes surprising. Yesterday I merely asked my friend Joseph Smallwood what he thought of Allan Nevins’ The Ordeal Of The Union that I am reading, and got another point of view about what really happens when any of us read and think, no matter how alone we may be when we do so.
A Sample from The Sphere and the Hologram
Although it may seem like I forget it from one month to the next, this website and blog are here not merely to air my opinions about things that (I think!) I know something about. They are also supposed to lead people to the books in which I have put what I know, as best I can.