The Task of the Author & Thinker

The Task of the Author & Thinker

[Something Deeperism Institute]

[Editor’s Note: “First Essays” has a slightly altered version of this essay. “First Essays” is available for sale (or free — write us at Editor@PureLoveShop.com and we’ll email you a copy) on the Buy Our Books! tab of this blog.]

At what, besides quitting this pointless drinking, should we would-be authors and public thinkers aim?

To answer that question, one needs to first explain what a human conscious moment is, and how we humans should think and act.

A human conscious moment consists of the Light shining through all things & feelings/perceptions/vague-notions/ideas/words/actions.
I guess everything slides together, so maybe it is best to say a human conscious moment is Light/feelings/perceptions/vague-notions/ideas/words/actions.
In any case, the only way forward for human beings is to organize themselves so that their whole conscious moment is guided by the Light, which alone knows what is really going on, what really matters, and how best to steer the other aspects of conscious thought.
And so the only way forward is to let the Light pull you to Itself through the goods it demands of you: as much (ever-growing) awareness, clarity, honesty, accuracy, competence, kindness, and shared generous joy as you can muster.
Though we need some intellectual/emotional principles/standards to ground our intellectual/emotional/spiritual searching, the way forward is more about organizing our ideas and feelings around the ultimately-ineffable Light than about the ideas and feelings we have about the Light and our relationship to It. Because, after all, an idea/feeling about the Light is not the Light, and when we pretend our ideas/feelings are the Light, we misdirect our focuses.
The way forward for a human conscious moment is to better and better follow the Light within, a path which includes the understanding that the Light can only be approximated by human ideas and feelings, meaning the way forward is a way of humility, caution, and constant self-reassessment (based on the inborn standards of awareness, …. shared joy) and -revision.

Given this state-of-affairs—which is True or else life has no meaning that any human can understand/care-about/bear, which is intellectually provable as any other notion about how one should think and act, and which we know at a level deeper and wider than our intellectual and emotional notions—what is the role of the public author and thinker?

Is it to get himself all riled up every weekend, drunk off of alcohol and his own genius?
No.
It really isn’t.
It is to meditate upon the whole human moment—from the Light through feelings and vague notions out into ideas, actions, interactions, and feedback—and sketch such meditations in art and thought.

It is not for an artist or a thinker to say, “Listen to me: I know the Truth.” But it is for such attempters to say, “Read me: I’m worth reading.” And what is worth reading but relentless, whole-being honesty? Actually, you need that, but you also need a light touch, otherwise the honesty gets obsessed with nonessential details, you lose the sparkle of the essential moment and the frolicking fun of creation, and your art and thought fizzle.

And now, alone here with his task, the nightwatchman runs over a few lines he heard at least week from the raucous, smelly, smushed-together standing- & looking-up center floor of the Globe Theater. He recombines them in his own mind, strikes a version he finds pleasant, imagines life upon and/or behind the stage. But then a higher-up walks by tall and demanding, and so he hops to and those silly daydreams scatter. He is, after all, a grown married man with a real job to do, namely to pace all night every night over these smooth stones and beside these rougher ones, lantern held high, demanding “who goes there!” of anyone he doesn’t immediately recognize. That is what he must do with all his power until death slumbers him out.

[Editor’s Note: “First Essays” has a slightly altered version of this essay. “First Essays” is available for sale (or free — write us at Editor@PureLoveShop.com and we’ll email you a copy) on the Buy Our Books! tab of this blog.]

[Something Deeperism Institute]

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