Ursula was saying something about working class families and redefining the democratic party—which needed to be done. I had no tolerance for democrats that stood for nothing but getting reelected by keeping their centrist corporate elitists happy. Something also needed to be done about partisanship within, and lifetime appointments to, the supreme court. The way things stood, now, was unacceptable. what do you want from me, dear heart? i want you to grow that was great, but, I wondered, what did she want from me? And when i say me, I mean the guy that I think I am, the complete man and his work—realized enough to secure this woman’s attention.
We were getting ready to take off: i’d switched to a four count breathing mechanism and I’d addressed Ursula with the password(s) I use to enter her subconscious. What are you working on? “Beside this?” i was tempted to tell her that i was deep into physics papers right now, but there was too little chance that I would be taken seriously—or even worse—I would be taken seriously and everything I’d done turned out to be riddled with mistakes—and hopelessly flawed. So I knew better than to talk too much about physics with anybody but my parents. It was better to lie, or change the subject, when asked a question that could lead, in any way, to the fact that I was spending so much time on physics papers that would never be peer reviewed or authorized by a serious physics paper audience.
Now, i never liked to lie, but sometimes, when you had something you wanted to protect, well, you do. Don’t think then, that I’m above lying; i just try to minimize it as much as possible—and, in fact, I tell people that I work on physics when they ask, even if it’s unpleasant—but I don’t volunteer the information. So, technically, i guess, I’m not lying—but what I’m saying is that I would if the time I spent on my physics was threatened.
i don’t want you to lie to me well, that went without saying—so, i said, “Don’t ask too many personal questions, then, at least not until we’ve had a moment to gain some real understanding of each other.” Now, years ago, about twenty years ago, now, i didn’t make a pact with the devil, but I entered a wormhole that cost me the chance to raise a family at a reasonable age—i made that choice, and, for years, when I realized how much i’d lost, I fought that choice, and it’s consequences. But the decision had already been made, and there was no going back. I would likely never have my own personal family—and, on top of that, I knew that I might never be discovered. I could bloom and grow, and it wouldn’t change my life. I might go about making those choices in a different way, now, if I had it to do over again, but I wouldn’t change anything that brought me to this point—6 physics papers, forty six books, both poetry and prose, and over 700 paintings.
I don’t believe that the devil exists; i think what we imagine as terrible is the definition of hell, a place where we’re cut off from any real human connection and, also, a meaning full life. But we exist—we know we exist because we’re conscious, and hell is for those of us that seem conscious, but they’re really just reflections of our personal failings that are there as bookkeepers, to hold us accountable for the bad we do every so often—bad done, most often, without our knowledge—we don’t always know we’re doing it, do we? Those people—without rhyme or reason—would go to hell because, ultimately, they don’t do unto others as they would have others do to them; they’re their to punish us, and, when we succeed in putting the genie back in the bottle (for now) they would go to hell—complete isolation; but they don’t exist—so they don’t, and we do exist, so we don’t either; so hell doesn’t exist for anybody—unless it’s a reflection of our life on earth, when, as it happens, we mightn’t have anybody in our lives to catch us when we fall—or to protect us from homelessness and boredom.
what are you trying to do to me? you’ll cripple me by presenting me with all the things I’d like to understand, but, at this time, can’t. take counting, for example—do you really expect me to count 24/7? the answer, of course was no, not exactly: “I want you to keep time 24/7—you can do that if you count a little—then it becomes second nature, it’s always happening in the background, you don’t have to do it until you’ve reached some allotted time, an hour, perhaps, in which you do count—or sing, or intone.” “Don’t let me torture you with something you don’t understand,” and, “the whole point is to avoid intrusive thoughts; if you don’t have intrusive thoughts, then you don’t need to do anything beyond allotting a specific time to think about it a little, but not too much—and not for too long.”
but i think she wanted to know my secret knowledge without actually learning it; the secrets i kept were a function of long periods of thought and reflection; you couldn’t understand them unless you applied yourself. You had to be willing to dedicate the allotted hour or so a day to progress. if you did, then you’d be happy but i think she meant, “if i did, then you’d be happy,” and that was more like it, yes, because, frankly, knowledge is meant to be shared—beauty is meant to be observed and understood.
we also keep things to ourselves that we’re ashamed of—but once we’ve suffered to the point of understanding where and how we went wrong, there’s no point in continuing to suffer. Therefore, what is this recurrence of shameful memories we wished never happened—they’re secrets, too! They are used as cover to insure the safety and well-being of the things we share. Something private, for example, could be intercepted by someone tapping into the same frequency—after all, if you know the right frequency, then you can listen in, and, sometimes, we can change the frequency until we find the frequency that interests us—and it’s usually the dominant frequency, it’s the one that they can hear, that they “select,” when they sample the range.
Nobody wants to remember being ashamed, but this feeling is how we construct things that make our lives more interesting, and, consequently, easier. A moment of shame tells us that the message behind it is doing more than telling us something—it’s actually constructing something that we can implement—we, in effect, are downloading each other’s secrets and each other’s knowledge. We’re both learning a language and using the language at the same time. We use the language to tell ourselves about our lives and what we love, what loves us, and how we’re happy. The more we use the language the faster we learn—and the more shameful the outside of the message is, the more construction, in our hearts and minds, is taking place. It’s kind of like we’re building roads from one place to the next, roads that we can use to commute to all the various places in our lives—the addresses, so to speak, that protect us.