|
Even if all goes well, in 30 or 40 years I will be dead. As far as I know, that will be it for me. I will have done whatever I am going to get to do. I will have found out whatever I am going to find out about my little corner of the universe. I will have shared in as much life as came my way; and I will have left whatever slight imprint I was able to muster up by way of reaction to the events of my life. You could say something similar about yourself also.
It is possible, of course, that you, like Kurt, knows a great deal more about this than I do. It is certain that you know different things than I do. You have an inner life of your own and you are set in somewhat different circumstances than I am; but like me, connecting our inner lives and our outer circumstance is a daily preoccupation. It is what we spend most of our time doing, whether consciously or unconsciously. It is not always easy to tell the difference between our inner life and your outer circumstances. Making that connection and trying to understand it is where everything get screwed up for me. Stay with me for a moment while this one melts in your mouth.
The mixture of conscious and unconscious elements in your life is one of the most interesting and perplexing things about it. No matter how far we advance in our self-understanding, there is always more to be known about that mixture. It's easy to forget that our lives always include both elements, conscious and unconscious. When we forget that, overlook it or simply try to deny it, we narrow ourselves down to those few things we can have on our minds at any given moment. And please don't forget your memory. It is there even when we are not consciously using it. It is 'our friend, carrying our bags for us even when we do not remember packing them. And man are those skeletons heavy!
Our lives are the medium for everything we might hope to do, to find out, to share; and yet it is easy to be unbelievably careless about the cultivation of our lives, our inner lives, it's factual basis, its developmental prospects, its needs and desires, the full dimensions of its relationships. I have found it possible to be quite fearful about my inner life and to let it drift off in fits of inattention into an isolation from which only I can lead it back.
We need the help of our fellow bloggers, friends, and loved ones; but only you can make the moves that will overcome this isolation, that will let the others help. This is the paradox of moral isolation: you got yourself into it and you have to get yourself out of it.
And what about our habits which cluster our behaviours. Some are serious habits to contend with. Our whole inclination is to rely on those habits rather than change them. We like to think that they are imbedded in who we are or, at least, who we have been. Sometimes I want to scream, "That's not me! That's just a normal life!
Without our solitude, we would have no life (of our own that is). We would just be and intersection in the universe with all kinds of traffic passing by, bumping and stumbling into and over itself and us, some of it just whizzing by. Then we are gone and it is a good question whether we were ever even there.
Some identify this experience of isolation with the experience of "transcendence" and claim it as the home ground for "High Religion" as well as modern science. All we can say in the end, is that the material will always be at hand for this interpretation.
We have to take our solitary state with ultimate seriousness. And because there is not a whole lot of guidance out there on the philosophical shelf, so to speak, being serious with our solitude is not easy to do. That may be one of the big reasons so many otherwise well-educated people do not see the point of philosophizing and cannot imagine what theology has to do with anything but churches that they do not belong to.
Stanner "The Angry but Gentle Reader"
|
