Headed for an eighteen-wheeler
I was looking out at the Pacific Ocean the other day. And – don’t tell me! – you had an insight. I had a change of mind. Insights out of the blue come of their own accord. Bluebird — autonomy. This time it was lake sprite. Questioning that’s self-conscious, intentional, and deliberately relational. I was looking for a better way of understanding. You wanted to capture a thought. Yes. To capture some part of me that’s missing and I feel the absence of it. I miss it. What would that be? Freedom. I’ve never before been so aware of what I’m missing as I am now, or so wanting to have it.
How limiting this existence is! So much so that my awareness may only be lifting up a corner of the blanket. What do you mean? Limited to one body with one mind that’s entrapped in its particular circumstances. So that we can say each of us is unique while being, at the same time, nothing new. A perspective and that’s it. Whose attributes may vary at the edges but not in the main. Not enough substance to have a sure sense of Self when it gets a makeover every day from time and Movement. I gaze out over the Pacific under Southern California’s August sun and ask for liberation from confinement. What comes back? “Experience the here and Now.” That’s not enough? No.
Why not? ‘Now’ is of time and time is conquests, defeats, and regrets from the past, skepticism, worries, and avoidance from the future, and a ‘present’ that’s always a mockery of ‘paradise’ and never Now. Troubled and troublesome. So claustrophobic and deceptive that I want only to escape from it. And you can’t. ‘Here’ is place. Spontaneity is a state of Mind. Life. Circumstances that input and output to serve the cause of Creativity. An ongoing tribute to the permanence of meaning and event. So time, being its reverse-opposite, naturally has to string everything out. Slowly and gradually reducing everything it touches to trash. Hopes and dreams along with works of art. Indiscriminately. A medical van loaded with elderly patients headed for a collision with an eighteen-wheeler loaded with illegal immigrants. The work of a nihilist.
Inexpressible hurt
What was your change of mind? I let the view express itself without my getting in the way. It came back with ‘Relationship’. An idea with feeling. Satisfying. Where was the satisfaction? In focusing on ‘Relationship’ instead of its boundaries. On the who and what before the where and when, the why and the how. Concomitants of feeling but without feeling themselves. Engineering specifications are nice but it’s the finished product I want. What was getting in the way? Thinking what I wanted was a negative: escape from time in the here and Now. Off on a horse ride without the horse.
You’re back to Love and Logic. Yes. Spontaneous Relationship. Love provides the impetus for Movement and the values that give Creativity meaning. When Logic adds the boundaries of Order, Movement has direction. All of it secured by Definition. Meaning and Purpose made definitive by Love inseparable from Logic. By the Spontaneity of attraction between complementary opposites. By Freedom. The seminal event that’s Energy. The inexpressible, timeless Now.
I miss the Freedom. And when I yield to frustration with time I yield to willfulness. Will my own victimhood, join in the nihilism, and reduce my Self to trash. Not a good feeling. I look at time to be filled as though it were a mountain of work too high to climb and I bonk. When the mountain and the work, and time itself, are all projections. Meant not for expression but for depression. The inexpressible terror of loss of Voice. Of loss of Worth – inexpressible hurt.
Back to equilibrium
How did California’s coastline speak of ‘Relationship’? I thought of the Pacific as a mirror where my lake sprite resides. The one who inhabits the smaller Mirror Lake in my Temenos. Where it’s an occasion for connecting with her variations – you and our friends. Variations of lake sprite, variations of bluebird. The other half that makes me who I am: a person with a Self that I wouldn’t have if I weren’t Relationship. When my mind reflects on its own, when it takes off in search of Freedom, it’s carried away on the wings of Spontaneity.
Carried away to what? Now and then to the I Ching. The Chinese Book of Changes, where my lake sprite also resides. For example in the imagery of Hexagram 60 “Limitation”: “above The Abysmal, Water. Below: The Joyous, Lake.” That came up for me overnight when my mind was in turmoil and needing to be at rest. Liberated. Why ask the I Ching now? Guidance usually takes care of it internally with insights but three-four times a year it sends me to the book. Last night was one of those times, six months since I got help from Hexagram 47.
Did you get help? Yes.
“A lake can contain only a definite amount of the infinite quantity of water. . . . In human life too the individual achieves significance through discrimination and the setting of limits. . . . Unlimited possibilities are not suited to man. . . . To become strong, a man’s life needs the limitations ordained by duty and voluntarily accepted. The individual attains significance as a free spirit only by surrounding himself with these limitations and by determining for himself what his duty is.”
My mind was in turmoil because in detaching from a project I’d just finished I became detached from a clear sense of duty. Like six characters in search of an author, it felt like I’d become detached from Guidance who’d been at my side for over five years and from the limitations of the project it was helping me with. My lake sprite. And I needed her help making the adjustment.
You’re a free spirit now? Her advice is a reminder that in our shared world as well as shared Creation Freedom requires Order and Order is limitations. Boundaries. It sounds counterintuitive. Sapiens’ misadventures often result from thinking that boundaries deny Freedom, which would be true if this weren’t a shared world. But it is, and so Freedom needs boundaries. Boundaryless Love needs the boundaries of Logic’s Order. It all needs Definition and Direction to avoid chaos. When limits fell away from what I was doing I lost my sense of Order. Structure was replaced by a sense of chaos and it was uncomfortable. Emotionally debilitating, depressing.
The feeling was of being trapped rather than liberated. Unbalanced, like something was radically wrong. I needed to reclaim a clear sense of duty with limits and my lake sprite nailed it with Hexagram 60. As usual. My mind went back to equilibrium. I’m me again!
Selfies
Carried away from what? From my strait jacket: willfulness. Perspective. Body. Circumstances. Most of all time because it’s the Spontaneity of Energy in timelessness that unleashes Movement. That breathes free, and time suffocates it. Traps us inside our time-limited pin-prick existences. No less confining were we to extend our average life spans from seventy-seven to seventy-seven hundred. Confetti, nonetheless.
Confetti? Remnants of experience retained by our memories. That originated out of many possibilities in theory but yielded only one fact in practice. To be spun rather than understood if there’s no other use for it. There is no use for it. Exactly. Our memory of an experience is its only remnant so far as we’re concerned. Subjective and one-sided, like everyone else’s. ‘Perspective’, the stuff of transactions and relationships. Of perceptions. Selfies. The market for such stuff is as fly-by-night as the stuff itself.
The essence of evolution
The solution, of course, is make-believe. Liberation from time and every other limitation by making up ‘facts’. Sounds great except for one glaring flaw. What’s that? If I were to look out over the Pacific Mirror Lake to connect there would be no lake sprite to connect with. No Relationship, just me and whatever I’m making up. Can’t ‘fate’ be your companion in make-believe? No, and not a pair of fuzzy dice either. Not if ‘fate’ is self-referential. Your own back side.
My lake sprite connects with me because she’s connected herself. With what? With the way things are that’s definitive. With Definition, the source of Guidance for all of Creation and Mind whether Parent or Child, Self-Awareness or self-unawareness. The Conscience and Constitution of Mind-Relationship, all its workers, and all their works. Not another Self if ‘Self’ is everything that is – one Mind interconnected and interrelated by Spontaneity, Order, and Energy in the Now – but another perspective. The only one in all of Creation that takes it all in from its ignition to its expression in the ongoing Now. From the Reality of Parents’ Self-Awareness to the unreality of their Child Free Choice’s self-unawareness. All of it answerable to Movement. The essence of evolution for which a static ‘big picture’ can never be its expression.
This cannot be
If the make-believer is the ‘creator’ of his own made-up world, he’s a monolith. The ‘supreme being’ at the top. The one-and-only. The self-appointed definer and arch-enemy of Relationship. Which isn’t a one-and-only supreme monolith. Correct. The know-it-all in charge of the mythical big picture who makes a point of not needing another perspective. Why? Because, of course, he’s already got it covered. Why would the author of the big picture need another point of view when his is all points of view put together? The very idea of ‘perspective’ is anathema. He’s the self-appointed arch-enemy of perspective. Correct again. This guy is on a roll!
- I connect with Creation through my lake sprite but I don’t identify with Creation or lake sprite either one. So long as I’m a Free-Choice trainee in this life, a sovereign individual responsible for building Character with Integrity; so long as Relationship with Guidance also defines me, my sovereignty must remain intact. Joined with Guidance but never overtaken by it or it would compromise my integrity and negate my purpose.
- The make-believer, on the other hand, must be the ‘creator’ in order for the stuff he makes up to be real. If the Self that’s been overtaken by the ‘creator-god’ were aware that he’s making stuff up it can’t be real for him. So he steps aside and lets his ass take over. His reverse-reflection ‘dark side’ and its fantastical ‘creation’. So much for integrity! He doesn’t form a relationship with his ‘creator-god’; he becomes his ‘creator-god’. While professing anti-god and anti-religion, vociferously contemptuous of ‘Jesus, not because they’re inauthentic but because they presume to compete with him. The one-and-only ‘God’ has no competitors. This cannot be.
Where the sun never shines
Pardon me, but how can this boob prevent competition? By wielding the power of ‘God’s will.’ Willing the opposition out of existence. Can’t be done. Ah, but you forget our friend the ostrich. If the threat can’t be removed the sensor and the senses that detect it can be removed. Hello? Are you there? Yes but you’re not. I’ve cleverly buried my head in the sand. So go away and let me rule my domain in peace.
My lake sprite and her Creation are Relationship and Relationship is relatability. Playful and trusting, helpful and harmless. Comfortable with Movement and evolution, learning and growth. The make-believer and his ‘creation’ are pretense of relatability. A joker-magician incapable of personhood and relationship. A not-personator uncomfortable with Movement. Who must fake whatever it is — jolly Pied-Piper playfulness and trust, helpfulness and harmlessness – in order to fit in.
Or deny whatever it is by capturing and immobilizing its prey: Character. That might otherwise escape from its predator with demonstrations of integrity. That most dangerous of threats. Why? Because the force for wholeness would deny the force for dis-integration the dominance that invincibility demands. ‘Superman’: the Nietzschean-Machiavellian tribal beast of corruption atop ass-kissing hierarchy. Rosenbaum’s ideal of procreation perched atop the symbol of its masculine power. The ultimate in unrelatability: a herd of wild beasts. Inaccessible, unassailable, and indomitable. A grotesque ideal of authority: ‘order’ by force. Chaos by any other name.
Sounds more like a herd of wild assholes. Very good. The ostrich with its head buried in a hole in the ground does have a certain connotation. Where the sun never shines. Yes. I like that. The make-believer rejects Loving Friendship with Guidance in favor of possession by his own back side so it can wield the power of ‘God’s will’ beyond his awareness. Thus placing his head securely up his ass.