I’ll just take your Higher Awareness for granted…
I’m suffering some kind of terminal whiplash; in grad school all we talked about was the meaning of life, the meaning of art, the meaning of culture.
And then, just the other day, an Art conversation with an ex-engineer manager friend:
Me: I’ve been painting
Him: Are your paintings any good?
Me: The question isn’t, are they any good, the question is, do they closely represent what I intended? and does it evoke a reaction? … and the answer is Yeah, some of the time.
Him: … huh?
… and I was surprised - not that he didn’t know as much as I did - but that he literally had no concept at all of art/music/dance creating and evoking higher emotions, a higher state of consciousness (not higher-being nonsense; a moment of greater awareness). … He had no sense that all art, to a large extent, is really different expressions of the same fundamental gesture
I was here. This is me. Do you feel this?
Evoking emotion, reaction, common humanity across time and space.
I tried to explain, until he started harassing me with sex questions and I logged off to do something else.
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It’s not the things you don’t know that will kill you - it’s the ones you assume, factor into your calculations, and ultimately trip over. My assumption - almost always - is that others operate at roughly my level of self-awareness (or more); that, at some point in their life, they dug down to the bare bones of themselves to figure out who they are, and where they’re coming from, that they at least have a sense of their own motivations. That they have, in effect, chosen this - whatever This is.
But it’s not true.
Most people just don’t have this kind of thought life. (Do you?)
As far as I can tell, most people spend a lot of time thinking about why things happen to them - but not about why they’re choosing something.
It’s easy to go through life dreaming, asleep, living from one Twitter link and newsfeed to the next. Really hard to create - and choose to create - every day.