Touch 3 The journey begins
Tuesday, 30. June 2009
The way you touch the world can determine the quality of the world, your life and my life and our lives. A person might grab at the world to take all they can. Another may hide from the world because it terrifies them. You can treat the world as a friend, an enemy, a battle, a beach, a mystical wonderland, a boring exercise in getting along or any combination of these states of appreciation and contempt – and any number of others. Your palette is potentially infinite, should you choose to use it, or it may be restricted to a few non-conscious conditioned responses. That’s up to you, or not, as the case may be…
Whenever I push this little boat out to people, addressing them as “you”, hinting that there is more to life than they might be noticing at the moment, some of them react on a scale from ignoring me to extreme hostility. Very few of them come back with “Thanks, Steve. That’s an interesting way for us to look at things.” Very many come back with their same repeated cliché responses, usually underscored with a hostile whine that I would have the arrogance to even suggest that they aren’t already complete in themselves with a perfect knowledge to tackle the world and a right to their own special opinions. Hold that thought and step around it, will you. It isn’t you; it’s only you when you aren’t being yourself. To enter this exploration with me I need you to be open to the possibility that we can know more and the further possibility that our minds can work together. There isn’t an answer. We aren’t in the classroom. You get no points for shooting you hand up. We’re into metaphysics here, of an accessible kind, and if I was some famous European philosopher who put this down in language you could never penetrate you would have already read 100 pages to get nowhere and be quite convinced that you are too stupid for such deep thought. It isn’t deep. That’s the beauty of it.
You might like to believe that your stance is “objective” but it clearly is not. It depends on your present mood and your habitual attitudes, which you may or may not notice as you assemble the paraphernalia of “reason” in order to deal with life, in order to place a cushion between yourself and all that incoming chaos that would otherwise overwhelm you. And, yes, I do mean you right now, that other you, the idiot you, the one who just bounces through life doing boring shit that needs to be done – oh and also his twin: the sensitive you who already knows all the answers to everything and has read a lot of clever books and had a lot of meandering conversations. I’m not interested in those characters. I’m interested in this real you, the one who can be real, the one who can love your life, the one who can see at once how rich a vein of exploration is contained in this single concept of touch.
You are in a relationship with life that is a two way process whether you like it or not, whether you even notice it and despite your lifelong attempts to control the flow and flux that is your destiny as a being by virtue of having consciousness. Life touches you, as it touches all living things with its processes but in your case you also reach out to life and your touch affects the incoming experience in a never ending dance of impossible-to-plot or explain consequences that may be beautiful, painful, boring, fascinating or any other thing that a person can imagine life being. You touch life physically, through your senses; you touch life with your mind, in science and in art, with reason and with anxiety, with planning and striving, with hungers and satisfactions; you touch life experientially and it is no accident that the same expression, I feel, can mean a sensation, an emotion or an opinion is being expressed or taking place, happening to you or being caused or met half way.
Of course you know all this already. What you don’t know at this moment is why I am asking you to stop knowing for a while and begin exploring this theme with me…
Next part will be
