I am stimulated by the thoughts that spin the worlds of others, and I benefit from tapping into some of that centrifugal force. A little cross-pollination works wonders. Reading is the best way to put me in touch with another person, as it helps me see the world from their point of view. I become them for a spell—it actually feels like I’m under a spell when I share their experiences. And, because I feel that the acquisition of experience is the reason for living, that can't be a bad thing.
Whether the author lives or is history is immaterial. If you enjoy a book and later discover that the person who wrote it has recently died, then doesn’t make a jot of difference to your enjoyment. I don’t need to relate to anyone in the actual flesh to appreciate what they say. In fact, reading their words is so much better than pow-wowing in real life—that's been my experience. And the corollary of that is that if you’d like to make friends with me, please don't knock on my door. But I wouldn’t ban you from sending me an essay.
Nevertheless, let the buyer—or borrower—of books beware. Don't dwell entirely within anyone's headroom, no matter how comfortable it feels when you first slip between the sheets. Don’t let yourself be completely swept away in the throes of a new love or affair lest you lose your sense of equilibrium and poise. If you are in the habit of reading books then, to act as a counterbalance, I’d strongly suggest that you write one too.
I say, give everyone a chance. Listen—or read—to them all, since we’re all of us monkeys on the same branch of the evolutionary tree. But heed or give more credence to those who speak more closely to your heart. In time, you’ll become more discerning. You’ll get to the point of being able to hear—first-hand, from your own mouth, in your own style—lessons that you already, miraculously, know. As the Chinese proverb goes, listen to what everyone has to tell you, but then decide for yourself.
According to Cato the Elder wise men learn more from fools than fools from the wise. Bruce Lee said that a wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer. The flip side of this coin is just as important, however. Richard Feynman, winner of the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum electrodynamics, as a boy was told by his father never to have any respect whatsoever for authority. “Forget who said it and instead look at what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, ‘Is this reasonable?’”
‘If you ever meet the Buddha on the road, kill him,’ goes the expression. What do you make of it? My guess is that it’s about the danger of exposing yourself to the teachings of would-be well-wishers, do-good gurus and proselytizing pimps. Killing the Buddha is therefore a pre-emptive strike. There’s nothing more dangerous than ideas, so be alert for them popping up on your radar. Echoing Feynman’s father, the Buddha told his followers: “Believe nothing. No matter where you read it, or who said it, even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and common sense.”
Using another analogy, it works like your taste in music and musicians. In that field an idea could be thought of as a riff or lyric. Now, there’s a set of artists each of us feels comfortable with and close to. For me it’s the Doors, Jimi Hendrix and Jethro Tull. In my book they can do no wrong. Then, there’s a group that I admire but who I can’t listen to all day long: The Beatles, U2 and Oasis. And below that there are other artists that I simply cannot groove to such as Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, even though they are highly esteemed. For some reason, they grate in my ears. So, what’s my point, and what’s the answer?
What it means is that everyone has a potential audience (and ipso facto a potential following). Second, everyone has to judge for themselves what sounds right. To ask, ‘Who is right?’ expecting to get a definitive answer, is . . . well . . . wrong. It’s the sort of quandary that you get into when you ask the same question about religions. There isn’t one that stands unarguably higher. It’s best to assume that, at their level, and from their perspective, every one is on track. Whether any set of ideas resonates with you is just a matter of taste.
A person's background, beliefs, world view, philosophical framework, and the stories that they tell themselves all support one another. They form a self-referential whole. A person’s decisions and actions make sense only when we realize that fact. And so, everyone is absolutely correct with respect to the views that they hold and the manner in which they conduct themselves.
Of course, that isn't much help to you. You’ll want want a means of being more discerning when you rake through the embers of other philosophies on the lookout for material to incorporate into your own way of thinking.
It’s probably best, therefore, to examine, not the set of thoughts that people have, but the principles that they are built on—the truths that they hold to be self-evident. Based upon that knowledge—a familiarity with the foundation stones underpinning their philosophical structures—you have a much better rationale for weighing up what they have to say.
In the same way that you pick and choose your friends, you need to be wise when you shop for advice. Though everyone has something valuable to contribute, you gravitate naturally towards certain individuals, and that probably says something about the relationship—or potential relationship—between you both (although I’m not sure exactly what).
This affinity that you or I feel—well, the ideal, I suppose, is that everything that you learn issues forth from within. It should not be spoon fed. People in the self-growth movement say that the answers are latent within us all, and that the most that they do is to help those answers bubble forth.
Take note, all you other gorillas. As you read these words, you’d better take that message to heart. As far as you’re concerned, I fall into that category also. My style of mental gymnastics suits me to a tee. But all you other primates had better use a filter. Get out your sun block and UV sunglasses.
Ideas can induce change. Generally, people avoid change, and with good reason. A change is not always for the better. Mutations are one form of change, and their effect is more often detrimental than beneficial. You don’t often hear of cancer having a positive outcome.
But some of us are addicted to ideas. We keep exposing ourselves to their danger because occasionally, perhaps once in a million, a mutation results in an improvement. That’s the one I’m after. I accept the risk, because I trust myself to evaluate a mutational idea’s worth. I’ll happily sort through an unpromising bunch to come up with a winner.
For me to rate an idea highly, it needs to be something that improves my life. It needs, in other words, to be applicable and practical. I need to be able to utilize or consume it on a daily basis. According to Jung, “Philosophy butters no parsnips,” so I’ll stake out my area of research as Applied Philosophy and see what grows in that garden.
The best ideas lead me to some mental construct that helps to explain, clarify, or tie disparate threads together. I’m on the hunt for anything and everything that assists me in making sense of the world. To me, there’s nothing finer than to come up against—unless that be to come up with—a brand new idea. That's the main reason that I read. That's what I live for.
And by that I don’t mean that I’m after ‘the latest thing’ per se. It’s not about titillation. For me, the novelty of an idea does not lie in its newness. I couldn’t care less it it’s up-to-date and on TV, or if the ancient Greeks were the last ones to fool around with it. My only requirement is that it needs to have impact—that’s how I sift the wheat from the chaff. The sort of idea I value must have the potential to affect how I live in and relate to the world. I’m in the market for ideas that force me to see things in a different light.
But at the same time, you’ve got to beware. Ideas that have the power to infect your world view are dangerous medicine. They bring about transformations that may single you out from the crowd. They awaken you from the consensus trance. They’ll earmark you as being different, and to stand out invites being cut down.
Say that you stumble across a piece of evidence that doesn’t gel with what you know. If it doesn’t sit comfortably within your world view, what do you do? If you want to be honest with yourself, you've got to be prepared to evolve and grow. Don’t ever insist that your current framework it is set in stone. Don’t ever go along with a person or belief system that is similarly inflexible.
If a person is positive that they are right, then they’ll act as though they’re guarding something valuable. Using James Howard Kunstler’s term, the psychology of previous investment makes them feel obliged to defend the status quo. Also, because you’ll never hear unbiased information in an advertisement, you should only listen to humble souls—if that is the way you’ve chosen to go, rather than figuring it out for yourself—who express their uncertainty, or at the very least in other ways demonstrate that they are not attached to their kit-bag of thinking.
Here's how to conduct an evaluation. Begin by supposing that there is a grain of sense in every wrong-sounding statement. After all, according to a person’s framework, every action they perform, every opinion that they hold, makes perfect sense. It reflects back their worldview. There’s integrity there, an internal consistency.
Allow yourself to ‘receive’ every thought or idea as if it was what Edward de Bono calls a ‘po’ statement (the term didn’t take off the way that ‘lateral thinking’ did). You don’t say ‘yes’; you don’t say ‘no’. Just keep your mind open. Suspend judgment, because it’s only through entertaining an uncomfortable thought that you learn something new.
For example, someone claims that no Jews died in the holocaust. 'Preposterous' is the right-thinking person’s immediate and automatic response. You want to put as much distance between yourself and such a blasphemer in the shortest space of time. But hold onto your horses. Don't rush away. Refrain from screwing up your face.
No one died? In what way could that be true? What could be an alternative meaning? Such a question may lead you to consider what you normally wouldn’t—for example what it really means to die. Could it be that there’s no such thing as death, or that death not what we imagine it to be? Use such levers to pry yourself further.
Life and death are just different sides of the same coin. Therefore, the holocaust merely hastened the inevitable. After all, everyone dies. That is a given. Everyone who is born is destined to die. As soon as you’re born, you’re dead. It's not that by killing someone you are doing something which would not otherwise happen.
When you are told that radioactive fall out killed 250,000, and you learn thereafter that it shortened those people's lives by several weeks—but fifty years in the future—what does that imply? How do you record that in the acturial tables?
See? What at first you react to as nonsense can be smelted into cerebral ammunition. The point is not to be too hasty. Don’t be in too much of a hurry to shoot a non-truth down in flames. Develop the habit of keeping your mind open and flexible. Jack be nimble; Jack be quick.
When you encounter something new, you can barely lay a finger upon it. You barely catch a whiff of it at first. Ideas are elusive. They are inchoate and they flit about like butterflies. They’re flighty, and you’ll never catch them without a net.
Writing is for me (and for everyone?) a scattered, fragmented business. To stitch multiple thoughts into a coherent, linked sequence actually goes against the grain; the best that you can hope for, eventually, is a patchwork quilt. So I don’t worry about an overall structure. Nothing so formalized. I reason that if an overall gestalt is to materialize, then it will arrive later—in due course and in good time.
What I did was write a little every day. I made it a habit, devoting a year or two to the task, coming up with maybe a couple of hundred vignettes. I wanted them to be short enough to be read at a sitting. I set out to accumulate not a stream of consciousness but a good number of thought-splashes: free-standing yet loosely connected brain farts. I felt that this approach mirrored the nature of my cogitation, which is to muse upon one random point at a time.
I freely flung upon the page whatever surfaced in my consciousness. Willy-nilly, onto the screen I heaved it. I plunged in, purged my inner self, and then stirred the mess around. I looked for meaning in the tea-leaves and entrails. I recorded anything and everything that left an imprint on my brain, and tried to make sense of it. Lifting myself by the bootstraps, I educated myself into a higher plane of learning.
Having daub-slapped onto the canvas my mental deliberations, I left them to mature—that was my system. Later, I returned to tweak, rewrite and delete. Sometimes, if I felt that I was onto something, and I’d expand that section afterwards. All very loose and fast.
Okay then, let's tally. First, we touched on the concept of God, where I’ll admit that I might have employed a certain sleight of hand (in the spirit of the means justifying the end). We established that there is one of some form or other, and we fondly nicknamed it Dog (what, you don’t name your pets?).
We established that fact quickly to erect a platform upon which to build (and then launch off from), not just for the sake of argument, mental exercise, or fun. I trust that you are satisfied that there’s some sort of power, even if that role devolves as yours. No way should you fear it—neither that Being, nor of having that mantle bestowed.
We chose to accept reincarnation as a possibility. We tossed around that concept so as to snap off a few sticks with which to build. Men at work: mental Meccano construction. Assuming that it operates, and that it is administered by man’s best friend, Dog (who better?) we’re not going to place limits on what can and can’t be done.
Reincarnation may occur as many times as it likes, without the essential DNA ever wearing out. It occurs as a series, and to everyone—not only to a select few. It doesn’t see bestiality as an issue—no, not that. You know what I mean. At death—physical death—the soul leaps merrily across time and space to take up residence in another body, geographical location not being an issue, and time not being of much concern either.
We were happy for reincarnation to suspend time for as long as it likes, and to leap periods of time ‘at a single bound’, if need be faster than light. Ah, but can it do the superman thing and spin itself backwards along the fourth dimension?
That’s a new one for you, isn’t it? Take a minute or two. Don’t snap back at me with an answer; I want you to give it some serious thought. Is it possible for someone to be reborn at an earlier hour, date, or year than that person’s death?
Tilt your head one way then the other, but hold onto your hat. We’re preparing to topple old Father Time from his throne, just as soon as we’re done with our recap. We’re going to turn the hourglass on its head and chop it into smithereens!
From your perspective, I’m not worth knowing. So forget me. After all, I may not even exist. What evidence do you have? We’ve never met. You haven’t seen me in a photo. You’ve only these pages printed with words. For you, it’s far more important to establish your own identity.
In The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Really Are, Alan Watts refers to identity as an ego in a bag of skin. David Crosby (from Crosby, Stills and Nash) calls the body a meat suit. Dave Pollard, a blogger, thinks of himself as “the space through which stuff passes”. Don Juan, in the books by Carlos Castaneda, sees a luminous egg with tendrils. Me, I’ve conjured up the jabberwocky.
I acknowledge input from Lewis Carrol, of course, but more especially Robert Heinlein. In Life Line, his first-ever published story, the dean of science-fiction writers describes a four-dimensional body:
‘You are a space-time event having duration four ways. You are not quite six feet tall, you are about twenty inches wide and perhaps ten inches thick. In time, there stretches behind you more of this space-time event reaching to perhaps nineteen-sixteen, of which we see a cross section here at right angles to the time axis, and as thick as the present. At the far end is a baby, smelling of sour milk and drooling its breakfast on its bib. At the other end lies, perhaps, an old man someplace in the nineteen eighties. Imagine this space-time event . . . as a long pink worm, continuous through the years, one end at his mother’s womb, the other at the grave. It stretches past us here, and the cross-section we see appears to be a single discreet body. But that is illusion. There is physical continuity in this concept to the entire race, for these pink worms branch off from other pink worms. In this fashion the race is like a vine whose branches intertwine and send out shoots. Only by taking a cross section of the vine would we fall into the error of believing that the shootlets were discrete individuals.’
Well, Heinlein’s idea lodged in my mind in much the same way (and location?) as Adam’s Rickmansworth meme. I grant that it’s not exactly glamorous to reduce life to a worm, sausage or tube, and you may feel inclined to turn up your nose. Please don’t.
Because consider just what that model accomplishes. By shaking hands with the jabberwocky we’ve taken time out of the equation and elevated our position to that of Czerner’s photon! For us in the now—in the know—time no longer exists. It “stands still, eternally”. We stand, like Dr Who, outside of time.
I must tell you about another science fiction story. Naturally, an alien race was involved, humanoid (writers should always keep in mind the possibility of a film adaptation). In fact, the aliens were virtually identical to human beings—two sexes and all. The major difference was that they were about a thousand times larger, and their inclination was to swat us like midges.
Before colonizing the earth, the giants sent out an exploration party. Some sort of fracas resulted from which the aliens came off second best. One or two survived, but they were brain-dead and no use for interrogation.
As an aside, consider the concept of ‘alien’. According to Ism ideology, there is no such thing of course. We’re all just appendages on the same tree. We’re simply differently shaped limbs on the one jabberwocky. Aliens, plants, or whatever—we’re all just talons, tentacles, trunks and wings. How daft it would be, for instance, if your legs stood in mortal fear of your arms. Still, in such a situation what are you going to do when an alien appears? Philosophize? No way, you pull out your blaster.
Getting back to the story, these aliens were so gigantic that after their prefrontal lobes were removed—their head injuries required major surgery—there was enough space for a lunar module-style office to be built inside the giant’s head. Living quarters were duly installed, along with a contraption that an astronaut-operator used to control the hulk of the giant’s body. Wired up to the remnants of the giant’s brain, he monitored the environment through the giant’s own eyes.
After about six months of training the operator learned the alien’s language and so forth. I don’t know how that went. Maybe it was possible to access the alien’s memory banks. And eventually the human-operated alien was sent back to its home planet in the original spaceship on another fact-gathering mission, this time for 'our' side.
I’m not sure how things turned out after that. For me, the best part of the story was how it portrayed consciousness. The idea that it is the controlling force that sits behind your eyes. Seen in that light, every life form is just a vehicle. Inside every head there sits an operator (begging the question of what homunculus sits behind the operator’s eyes).
