As mentioned in the post below, I'm desperately trying to derive some meaning from last week's attempted hard drive transfer horrors. What good is frustration? Usually we avoid it at all costs. I certainly would have sacrificed almost anything to the Great Computer in the Sky last Thursday if she could have blessed me with a benediction: "Go, Dell Inspiron 8200, and crash no more." But, what would life be like if we never ran up against seemingly insurmountable obstacles? Would we just contentedly sit on our butt, not being driven to try to crash through the barrier that divides where-we-are-now from where-we-could-be?
In a recent New Scientist article, Alan Lightman (a novelist and physicist) talks about the art of science. He relates an interesting story about working on his Ph.D. thesis in a state of confusion and failure for months. Then, he experienced a breakthrough to an egoless condition of rightness. Everything now was clear. But it took being stuck in murkiness for a long time to get to the clarity. One line of his expresses just how I felt after four fruitless calls to technical support, and then realizing that if anyone was going to figure out my computer problem, that person was me. Lightman says, "I don't think any other person in the world would have been able to help me at that moment, and I didn't want any help. I had all these sensations and revelations in my head, and being alone with all that was an essential part of it."
To be fair to CMS tech support, they did email me some software yesterday that, they hoped, would fix my problem. It's the same software, I'm quite sure, that I had figured out on my own that I needed. So it's nice to get help from other people. But in the end, as my favorite philosopher, Plotinus, says, the journey we all take is "the alone to the Alone." That sounds ominous, but what he means is that there is One (God, if you like) that isn't like anything else. The One is Alone, because the One is, well, the only One. No one else can experience the One for us, so we are alone in knowing the Alone. If that doesn't make sense, you'll have to read my book, "Return to the One," when, the One willing, it eventually is published.
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