I feel destined for greatness, even if my greatness is only to be great at being myself. I am the all american man, a product of the american experiences I have to this point mentally digested and sub consciously allowed to conform my being.
Be it impossible for our minds, in their natural state, to understand all that is to be understood? If so, should we still strive to understand all that we can, or should we merely accept the fact that we as a race are slightly more developed than all those we know of that surround us, and in light of that understanding, be content to carefully balance extracting the most pleasure possible from life and having a long life?
Why am I the all american man? Because I understand how things are and accept them. Because I am educated. Because I am hard-working, enjoy my time to myself to pursue my individual pleasures. Because I know things should be different and accept that. Because I know things will never be perfect. Because I accept that my country is not right, but also because I appreciate all the things I don’t even realize I take for granted because I was born in this country.
Why do I have so much self confidence? This is a question I cannot answer. I do not know from where it came, how long it will stay, or, in the event that it leaves, why it will do so.
Remember every song you ever heard, every book you ever read, every movie or play you ever watched. Remember every fine piece of artwork or black and white family photograph, and the emotions all these experiences brought forth in you. Now, right now, any time you choose, is the time to act on these feelings. The time to make your own story. If you choose to do so, you can at any time. Its like a free pass you carry with yourself all the time. Naturally, if you choose to let life take you where it will, that is fine. I personally don’t think that’s an appropriate decision, but up to this point in my own life, I feel as though I have been pushed by the winds. The only direction I have taken is in my mental reaction to the instances which have changed my trajectory. Sometimes I make conscious decisions, based on pleasure or need (are there any other reasons to make decisions?) but did I really make those decisions, or were they simply a reaction to things which had already happened-reactions which I thought were my decision, but ultimately were just a necessary occurance for the unvierse to continue as it should? Are things really that inter-connected? Is all in everything, are we all a part of the same one thing? Why is so much of life devoted to pleasure? Is that truly the goal? What about enlightenment? Is it achievable? If so, and even if not, why are we not constantly striving for that? Or are we, and we don’t even know it? I suppose everyone pursues what to them is the best, based on the experiences they have gone through-power, control, pleasure, enlightenment. But why did each of us go through the experiences we have gone through? Do our actions affect people we don’t even know, people dead and people unborn? I mean little actions. Is there any way we’ll ever know? Why do I wonder about these important questions, yet most of the time wander along apathetically, working and playing and counting my money?
It was not her un-understanding of things, but her unwillingness to attempt to understand things, which I did not like about *. “I don’t understand, and I don’t want to try to understand” was the gist of my perception of her position several times. This I abhor. That, and the tendency for people, when in the face of something difficult, i.e. learning a new sport, to sit and be negative, or at least not constantly attack the ineffieciency at hand until it is demolished.
I might be just a tiny bit enlightened. I think everyone is though, and I have just realized that what I considered before to be simple pleasures (admiring nature, finding joy in pure existence) were perhaps short bits of enlightenment, bits which we all feel from time to time.
One of many good quotes from Aldous Huxley’s “The Doors of Perception:”
“In a world where education is predominantly verbal, highly educated people find it all but impossible to pay serious attention to anything but words and notions. There is always money for, there are always doctorates in, the learned foolery of research into what, for scholars, is the all-important problem: Who influenced whom to say what when? Even in this age of technology the verbal humanities are honored. The non-verbal humanities, the arts of being directly aware of the given facts of our existence, ale almost completely ignored. A catalogue, a bibliography, a definitive edition of a third-rate versier's ipsissima verba, a stupendous index to end all indexes - any genuinely Alexandrian project is sure of approval and financial support: But when it comes to finding out how you and I, our children and grandchildren, may become more perceptive, more intensely aware of inward and outward reality, more open to the Spirit, less apt, by psychological malpractices, to make ourselves physically ill, and more capable of controlling our own autonomic nervous system - when it comes to any form of non-verbal education more fundamental (and more likely to be of some practical use) than Swedish drill, no really respectable person in any really respectable university or church will do anything about it. Verbalists are suspicious of the non-verbal; rationalists fear the given, non-rational fact; intellectuals feel that "what we perceive by the eye (or in any other way) is foreign to us as such and need not impress us deeply." Besides, this matter of education in the non-verbal humanities will not fit into any of the established pigeonholes.”
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