Vicariousness 3
Context
Discontinuity and how this points to the ephemeral nature of all experience
Using discontinuity to learn
The role of context in our larger learning
You see, it would be reasonable to state that the very purpose of living is trying to embrace as many experiences as possible. Now we want to do this not for the experiences themselves, but for the experience of growth that goes along with it. That, of course, is not how it appears when we live life and choose this experience or that experience. We choose because we are excited by experiencing what we choose, but the reality is that the growth is a common unmet hunger that constantly fuels all of our choices. This stands true, regardless of the manner in which this truth is veiled in your personal experience.
It goes without saying that people generally tend to embrace those experiences that they resonate with. However, even in that fold, there are entire lifetimes and lifestyles that you will never even know of, let alone never experience. Isn’t there a real sense of loss, of being left out, at some fundamental level, when you hear this.
Let me explain. If the totality of sentient experience encompasses all of these myriad expressions of living that we hear about, and those that we don’t hear about, then it is reasonable to suggest that it is in the experiencing of all of this that our experience is complete. Let me illustrate with a common feeling that shows up in our lives at very particular moments in our lives. I call these moments of discontinuity.
Here’s an example. You’ve gone to college, and you’ve gone through myriad experience over the last four years. You’ve made a new home, and you’ve nurtured a new family in this new home that you call your college. It is graduation day today. The shared experience of struggling or singing through classes, through assignments, through examinations and through all manner of success and failure shows up as an emotion for you on graduation day. There is a heightened significance for those that you’re not going to share this experience with again, now that you’re done. It is the death of your college experience, in a sense. All of that which bonded you to your friends, teachers, TAs and others is palpable. It is present in the air. It is present in the eyes of those that meet you on this day.
The thought crosses your mind at some point during the day, maybe I’ll never see this person again. You look at the families congregated on the college premises, and there are so many familiar faces, and so many unfamiliar faces. Whatever the case, you realize this deep, overwhelming emotion coursing through you. It is this emotion that is just too complex to get a hold of. You want all of this experience, and yet there is something so utterly consuming in experiencing it. It is almost unbearable to have to face the fact that this is the death of your college experience.
This is a moment of discontinuity. In such moments, as human beings, we stop doing the things that we usually do. We stop taking life for granted, and the death of one phase of life slaps us in the face, and wakes us up to the transient nature of all experiences in life. For the majority of human beings, it takes this sort of long, protracted training in the school of life to gain one glimpse of such a fundamental truth. In our recognition of the transience of the experiences that we go through in life, however, is also hidden a sense that there are so many other experiences that are left unexperienced.
We can only relate to one experience as being dear, and hence despair its end, when we indeed haven’t emoted similarly for all other experiences. If you went to school for mathematics, and end up teaching mathematics, you’re never going to experience the travails of a medical student. And vice versa. The point though is that the experience that showed up on graduation day is the result of having gone through a very specific set of experiences, and then realizing that they are ending. The depth of recognition is powerful enough that it takes us to the root of our real lesson here on earth, which is recognizing that all experience is transient, and that all experience, cherished or otherwise, stays with us a while and then sails right on. If one was able to hold on to such a recognition even during the having of all of those experiences, then graduation day would have a completely different level of experience associated with it. The depth of the experience would not be lost, not an iota of it would be lost. On the other hand the emotion of being overwhelmed would perhaps be either fully appreciated, or would perhaps be absent. You cannot be overwhelmed by an experience which you’ve trained yourself to handle. In all of this, it is important to recognize that being overwhelmed is a very valid choice that one chooses to experience as well.
At a surface level this may seem reasonable logically, and yet far fetched practically. However, there is another direction we can proceed in, if we want to tap into all of sentient experience. We can tap into that common strand that permeates all experience. It is possible that as long as we can unearth this common strand, we have learned the lesson that we signed up for when we showed up as sentient beings.
The key here, then, is that enlightenment, should such a word be appropriate for that state where one realizes one’s true potential, describes realizing that common strand that permeates all of human experience. The key that I want to discuss in this work here is precisely the method that we can utilize for realizing this common strand.
Here’s the general idea. Take another person as an example.. Now, we want to walk a few edifying miles in that person’s shoes. So, how are you going to relate to that other person? If you want to relate to the totality of another person’s experience, it means that you must find some way to relate to your own experience in the first place. In the absence of other subjective evidence, it is reasonable to assume that the elements of relating to personal experience are the same for every one of us. It’s a working hypothesis, in the absence of alternatives.
So let’s start there. Let’s take an example. Let’s take Bill. Bill is forty years old, and he is a figment of my imagination. But Bill exists all over the world. Bill works as a schoolteacher, and he got into his position for some private reasons of his own. He is divorced and wants to find a partner for himself, but he has to cope with alimony payments and he has to find the time and make the effort to search for new partners while competing with other teachers at work, because Bill isn’t the sharpest tool in the educational shed, and he wants to keep his job.
I simply made Bill up. The thing though is that people in his situation exist. This is one specific situation, and not some Jungian archetype. The point here though is that when Bill wakes up in the morning, he does not go through the process of reminding himself of the entire context of his life. He does not wake up and mentally sound out to himself, verbally or otherwise – ‘I am Bill. I work as a school teacher in an arbitrary school in some random neighborhood. I have my own goofy ideas about how the educational system should be set up, and I recently got divorced from that &*#&**##** to whom I still have to pay good money because I didn’t read the ##***$$ prenup closely enough.’
Bill doesn’t have to remind himself of all of the context of his situation, because he is the product of that context. The specific set of circumstances and thoughts that constitute Bill’s waking, walking, talking experience is something that has organically grown from those things that he experienced. This is true enough. The idea here then is that when Bill moves to work on this priority of his or that other priority of his, the momentum of thoughts that carries him into those priorities is readily available to him by virtue of already being embedded in this context.
So, Bill wakes up on any given morning, and if he is your average human being, he does not give himself the gift of some space from the train of thoughts that ride through his mental railroad. The moment he comes to, the moment he is wide awake, he is embedded firmly and securely in his own context. That is, he remembers that he must do this, or he must think about that, and they are deeply embedded in his context. So, his actions are based on that context, which is all well and good, and he acts, nine times out of ten if I am being generous, based on how his context dictates that he act. A very small fraction of human beings exercise their free will. The majority allow the history of their habits to dictate their actions.
So if perhaps Bill has to make some presentation at work, and if he has made some slides on it the previous day, then this day he continues and works through the remaining slides. He informs himself on his thoughts about his slides by going over his earlier slides and reacquainting himself with the narrative that they form, and then he propagates that narrative forward. If he is one of the smarter ones, then he will already have figured out the one or two other people at work whose opinions on this presentation matter, and he will go right ahead and work the slides so that their feedback and their questions are anticipated and accounted for in his slides.
The point though is that he is not going to have to remind himself of his entire context, and this is really a good thing in the context of presentations and things of its ilk. But, if Bill wanted a fresh perspective, then he ain’t getting himself one. You never get a fresh perspective by allowing your habitual thoughts to direct you, unless detaching yourself from habit is your habit.
I believe this actually is something that George Bernard Shaw was alluding to when he said that most people only think a few times a year, and that he made an international reputation for himself by thinking a couple of times a week. Our thoughts propagate their own families. They don’t go out looking for fresh perspectives. That’s our job as sentient beings capable of free will. Our thoughts simply propagate their own kind. So if you are largely thinking about the same things that you thought about yesterday, guess what cousin, that’s not really surprising. It takes hard work[The idea of hard work needs to be clarified here. People tend to think of this as being the whole sweating and burning midnight oil thing, when in fact, hard work is something that is precisely the sort of thing that is hard to do. Hard work is not the same thing as doing a whole ton of easy work, unless a whole ton of easy work is precisely that one thing that you’ve been putting off. Let’s take an instance that would resonate with many of us today. Let’s say you’re job hunting. Let us say that you know how to look at a job posting and to put out a middling application, with a standard cover letter having attached your CV to the application. Hard work does not mean putting out a 1000 middling applications instead of putting a 100 middling applications. That is simply doing a lot more easy work, and it isn’t weal directed or deep effort, even if it does lead to a job in one manner or another. But hard work instead is to sit down and figure out what about the application process teaches you the most about yourself. That of course starts out with figuring out precisely how you want to be spending your work day. What is it that you would like to do when you say you want to work, and why? Once you’ve come up with an answer that feels right to you, you go ahead and persist in the endeavor of tracking down companies or institutions that offer it to you and you also constantly refine your own role in such a position, so that you can approach interviewers with this knowledge. In short, hard work, in this example, is actually making the effort to answer this fundamental question of what you would like to learn about yourself.] to really think.
