On the Nature of Life, Part IV.

A soliloquy from the banks of the Hudson, April 6

Photo: Nyack, April 5 2024

It's interesting to me that one can understand many esoteric things, and still be entirely in the midst of an unknown life.

I was driving by the church that my wife and I were married in yesterday – a somewhat chance event, having gone into its general vicinity in Nyack, New York, just to pick up lobster rolls and pasta. I decided to do things differently and go home through the maze of one-way streets in that part of town by driving by the church. It's spring; and there are many flowering trees near the church, although that wasn't my motivating factor – I just wanted to change things up a bit.

As I drove by the church, I realized that none of us actually know what we’re doing in life. In a certain sense, everything just presents itself – the inevitable, which is connected to everything else that has ever happened in this cosmos, including our own birth – rises up in front of us and asserts itself.

We forever do no more than follow our noses; life presents a path forward, and we tread it because we must.

The questions of free will and predestination are, of course on the table in such moments; and having read a portion of David Bentley Hart’s You Are Gods just an hour or so before the errand, that rather theoretical set of questions was hanging in the air around me, although I wasn't conscious of their presence at just that moment. It was, of course, interesting that I ran into that passage or set of passages just the day after I wrote about the law of inevitability; and here I was in the midst of life, immersed in this question of inevitability as expressed in Gurdjieff’s adage, “for one thing to be different, everything would have to be different."

Following closely on the heels of that comment are Jeanne de Salzmann’s remarks on the fact that the only thing we can change is our attitude; and I see that in a certain sense, God’s will is, indeed, inevitable. The question is not whether or not this or that will happen, or whether or not I’ll "make”  it happen; I won't. The idea that causality comes to heel like an obedient dog at my beck and call, and that I control anything whatsoever, ought to be put to bed forever – firmly putting aside all the theology and philosophy –by a study of the way that cells operate, another subject I’ve been concentrating on as I continue to read How Life Works  by Philip Ball. It looks like a book on mircobiology, but it’s actually a work of theology and philosophy if read with sufficient inferential attention to detail.

The only place where we "control" what happens is in our imagination.