Talking to myself.

[silveradept]

I was supposed to go one place, and didn't. In fact, I didn't even realize that I had thought I wanted to be there until I was home and the even was already, well, over, for the most part. D'oh. Will have to make arrangements with the right people to see if I missed anything important. Right now, of course, my assignments buzz at me like flies, and so I'm trying to swat them away. The workshop was on career stuff, you know, for jobs that I might like to be holding when summer rolls around again. Of course, the sore throat I had for the last couple days had now become a head cold, sticking around in my sinuses and stuffing alternate nostrils like it is wont to. It should go away soon, I hope.

And I went through a fragging boatload of reading today. Two "Young adult" novels, my reading assignment for tomorrow's class which I will skim again before darting off to section tomorrow, and possibly some illustrator analysis. The weekend should turn out to be very fun. Friday will probably be spent, not only just trying to get ahead, but to get ahead comfortably. (You may laugh your collective arses off now.) And from there, all sorts of fun in both work and school-related activities... whee.

Anyway, the title of the post indicates something that I've been wanting to play through, and just haven't had time to do so. I've gotten the start of it, and put off the rest of it, but now I can finally take the time to explore it fully.

The setting is somewhat nebulous area. There's a path, possibly cobblestones, possibly concrete, and trees at least on the left side. Possibly a stone fence on the right, as I walk. Background isn't always particularly important to me when I go wandering around like this. It's probably my head, for once, rather than the fragments of the characters. You'll see why in a bit.

Anyway, so I'm walking along, muttering to myself, and make a remark aloud like "Here I am, many years later, and still no closer to truth than when I began."

"Well, I'm not surprised, since you're always changing the question."

"Oh, hello, Aloren." He's sitting on the fence, whatever it is, and hops down to join me on my walk.

"Seriously, though. Take a look at the progression. Back in elementary school, you were searching for Truth, and God. And you were trying to do it within a framework provided by your parents. You might have thought that you had it in some way, shape or form. Or rather, that you hadn't experienced any significant departures from it."

"Your point being?" "Well, you went to middle school and you found the book about magic, which opened up the readings on Neopaganism and that framework. Once again, you were looking for Truth and God, but you'd changed your frame of reference. You were trying to get things to cross over and possibly mesh. You were drawing parallels, trying to make it so that you didn't have to start from scratch again. I'd say you did a pretty good job. You eventually discarded the old framework."

"Not to say that I still couldn't walk through the service blindfolded and say all the right prayers."

"Point made. Still, as you went through high school, you expanded your focus to other religious and spiritual systems - you took on more gods and more ideas. You still went at it with a synthetic bent, as if you could distill the essence to both Truth and the Divine by comparing the various systems with each other and looking for the places where they matched. There's a lot of matching data there, by the way. I suspect you've formed some ideas by assimilating them - you have discovered several principles guiding most of the world's religions. They're not even necessarily bad ethical principles to live by, either."

"I don't see the point."

"Each time you took on a new system, you changed the terms of your query. By adding more data to the mix, you probably complicated the question further. Instead of looking for Truth in one system, you look for Truth by studying five. While that makes for good paper length in academia, it does complicate life questions considerably. You always tell me that you're jealous of people with strong faith. Is it perhaps because they have found the answers in the sphere of questioning that they used?"

"So to find an answer, I'd have to restrict my search?"

"Something like that. You can have unshakeable faith in God if you don't consider any other religious path to be valid. Or at least don't consider any beliefs with a different conception of God to be valid. By adopting the synthetic principle, you upped the difficulty of the problem. And by invoking Heisenberg like you do, so that you're not even sure that there is a Truth, well, you can see how difficult you've made things to find an answer."

"Finding one would be glorious, though. I always feel like I could be extraordinarily happy if I could just find the answers."

"We all do. Wisdom in this case might be realizing that you're trying to evaluate an equation at an undefined point. They best you could do is take the limits as you approached it."

"So if I stop looking for an Answer and start enjoying the process, I'll do a lot better?"

"Yeah, in a nutshell. Be more Zen. You're making progress, that much is sure. I'll give you a hint - if you make it to Enlightenment, there's a good chance you won't have a clue that you're there. And if you're expecting something like 'This is my Enlightened Prophet, listen to him', you're probably not going to get there."

"So there's a possibility, however infinitesimally small it might be, that I've already managed to obtain the plateau of Enlightenment?"

"Yeah. It's possible. Your stress levels might say otherwise at the moment, though. Beyond that, enlightenment might require an outside observer to be proven."

"So I won't know, but everyone else will? Sounds much like a Merlin fate to me."

"That's not to say you might not know at some point as well. I'm just saying that you might have to be there a while before you realize it. Or that someone will strike with the frying pan in such a way that jars you far enough out of yourself to see it. The usual refrain applies - you've accomplished a considerable amount so far with your life, even though it seems like everyone else is out doing more and better. You're just using the wrong measuring stick. Stand on your head for a bit - not only will the blood rush to your head, but you might be able to get some perspective on things."

"Easy for you to say. All I have to do for you is write 'And he was enlightened' and it happens. I don't have quite as easy access to the ink and quill that's writing my story."

"So practice a bit at it. You've got a compendium of strange things, weird rituals, and other means of altering your own subatomic fields. Why not put some of them into practice? Just because you think you don't have the tools for it doesn't mean you can't try a couple things here and there. Or make some up yourself. 'Nothing is forbidden, everything is permitted' and all that."

"I dunno. There's a block somewhere - like I don't really believe in it. Or that I'm scared of the results. Or that I think I don't really have the stuff for it. All sorts of very strange and negative things. Which is a bit silly. Maybe it's all that old Catholic guilt - failures are your own fault, success only happens because you got blessed by God. Failures are deliberate, success is serendipity. Which would explain why I get anxious about assignments - I worry that my luck's not going to hold, even though I might be turning in a paper that is correct on all the particulars."

"Which is silly. Extraordinarily silly. Frying-pan silly. I'm not necessarily advocating Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, but it wouldn't kill you to actually admit here and there that you've got some talent in things that you don't normally think of as your strong points."

We could go on for a very long while about this sort of thing. And did. Things like making friends, both in general and with the opposite gender. The charm that I think I don't have. Suffice to say, it's probably all stuff that you've heard before. I just don't know how to get over the hump. Or, more accurately, I don't see it. (Cue 2x4/frying pan) Or perhaps most accurately, I dismiss the good stuff and focus on trying to get rid of the bad. Need to figure out how to fix that.

The problem with talking to oneself is that you tend to go in circles. So rather than spin about faster than Tenny chasing his tail, I'll let it sit there and go to bed. Then, perhaps, I’ll be able to wake up tomorrow with the cold gone. That would be optimally excellent. I wish I had Dominion white blood cells. The Inherent Superiority in fighting off viruses would be very handy right about now. Although I suspect that they've long since abandoned such quaint biological notions like those and are hard at work perfecting their nanomachines.

Comments

[greyweirdo.livejournal.com]

I never whack sick people with a frying pan. Particularly when all they're doing is looking around and asking (albeit in a whimsical way) "Am I makeing and progress?"

[greyweirdo.livejournal.com]

any progress, not and progress. Fucking keyboard keeps moving the letters around on me.

[silveradept]

It'll do that to you. It's made more than a few jokes at my expense like that.