A Walk With Wilson

Over the mountain and around the hills, hooked to the book by airpods

Linda just told me that they made Thanksgiving a holiday in Costa Rica in 2022. “It’s a good idea to celebrate gratitude,” isn’t that far from, “Pura Vida.” Living a pure life is living a life of gratitude, and instead of youth’s vain mirror, in old age the mirror becomes other faces. What response do I see there?

My little sister, and select others, will tell me they like my personal essays. But I am always liable to fly off into the sky which literature has made for me to fly in, forgetting that nobody really cares about ideas divorced from life on the ground. I have a couple of friends who like my talking about concepts, so let’s get that over with first. I apologize in advance.

Today I burned through about five hundred calories while listening to Colin Wilson’s, “The Philosopher’s Stone.” I remembered, years ago, reading in one of his books about Arnold Toynbee, the historian, finding himself outside the linear flow of time. His reality melted away as Roman soldiers appeared. He had shifted to the second century, into an event which exists outside of time. He said he no longer felt mediocre, accidental, or mortal. He had shifted to the mythological realm.

This story of Toynbee has stayed in my mind for years. What is timelessness? If space and time are relative, is timelessness space beyond time? Is it a state where things happen without regard to distance? In time, events are separated by their position on a cause to effect time line, but in space there is a shared location, as, on the internet, or in dreaming, where two story lines can unfold simultaneously. If there is no distance, it takes no time to move from one event to another, in any order. To move to space, there has to be a shift in navigation from referencing an external structure, because it takes time to reference an external structure. And if I’m not careful, I’ll stand accused, and rightfully so, of trying to educate people against their will.

While listening to Wilson’s story, I realized he was affected by Toynbee’s experience, and wondered how we can, by will, access states of consciousness beyond linear time. He set his brain to working on it, and his brain just kept working away, which a good brain will do. Wilson came up with what he called, Faculty X, which I suspect was an influence on Elon Musk. I said that as a joke but it’s probably true. This faculty describes an intense, focused act of will requiring elimination of negative emotion. Toynbee had moved himself out of the ordinary flow of linear time, into a timeless place. How did he do that?

Okay, that’s what I was musing about while I was walking today: that when you set the brain to working on a question beyond your comprehension, it grows and flowers, year after year, so long as you water it. It has to be a question which presents a level of difficulty that will last a lifetime. For Einstein, it was, what’s it like to ride on a beam of light to visit your relatives? For Wilson, it was, can we raise consciousness by an act of will.

Wilson interests me, but at the same time, seems deliberately provocative, as when he trashes Shakespeare as being pretentious and untalented. I think that Shakespeare is to English what Goethe is to German. The value is not in somebody’s opinion, but in the plays revealing the patterns of the collective unconscious. What was hidden at the pattern level becomes visible. The story is fated because the characters are caught in an unfolding unconscious pattern. Trying to stand against a pattern with will is like being a leaf and standing against the wind. The reasons given for actions taken are not reasons at all, but justifications for behavior. The reason is the pattern. The only way out of the pattern is all the way through. By participation, the audience sees the pattern in the play, and it loses the advantage of unconscious suggestion.

The play is the thing, actually.

So I think Wilson enjoys the image of his pissing on Shakespeare from the balcony seats. I’d write him a letter of complaint if he was still alive. Alas, he is stationary, and will not again riot a quill. He’s like an old friend who, being English, is peculiar, and I allow him that because he was such a prolific researcher and writer, while I couldn’t finish a burrito.

On the way down the trail, I stopped at three benches to do reverse pushups. I face away from the bench and lower and raise my bodyweight. It occurred to me last week that I always do incline pushups in the ordinary way, facing forward, but what about the backs of my arms? I’m trying to not lose all my muscle. Getting old is shedding things, like hair, muscle, teeth and testosterone. I know friends who supplement, and I’m sure it makes them feel younger, or at least, hairier, but for me, it’s like watching porn. It requires no imagination, and the imagination, unexercised, loses potency. I’m not younger, I’m old, and I’d feel silly competing with younger men on their level, instead of moving up a level.

There is no shot in the ass as powerful as having to actually love, out of control, removed from the flow of time, the will fully engaged, where there is no meaning beyond the responses, and nowhere to go but along the paths they open. When resistance is encountered, don’t use force, reduce the resistance. Maybe, the resistance will vanish.