This quote I sent to Nadette in an email started a conversation I want to keep and possibly expand upon.
"In his splendid essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,” Schopenhauer points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature."— Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth.
This was her question:
"Schopenhauer had a very routinely driven life in his old age in which he did the same thing every day. Did he everyday in his morning studies examine his dreams to reason on his younger life rip currents or simply let them be to weave on new ones of his later years ?
I’d like to fully get to the latter. Will you go there as well ?
Forget who we were w/whom at a time and simply be who we are now and w/whom we are ?"
"As to your question regarding a course of study or 'let them be' :
I would rather (and am) working toward relaxing into the who of me, without worrying about anything or anyone who was in my life in its formative time. My goal (though I never formally set goals) is to get over this shame-based existence I had, and Be... which means being ok with my ego, and my control issues, and my insatiable need to talk and explain and interrupt, etc. All that takes is some internal listening, and in my case, a therapist!
To really RELAX into our lives.
From NWH: "Just a popping thought: the human world is in dichotomy ... How the way be with in one and with the out one ...🧐 ?"
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addendum: 10-5-20
NWH and I met in person a day or two after all this and had a very good discussion.
I learned that we define a few things Very differently. Partly due to cultural differences, and partly due to huge differences in our education. For example: She took the Schopenhauer quote very differently than I did. I read only the words on the page, and related.
She related to all that she knew (or believed) about Schopenhauer from her philosophy classes...big difference.
We know now clearly that we love each other. Probably always will. <3
"PS2: we must look at the root of our dysfunctions as adults and feel comfortable disliking or hating he/she/them; moreover we must render them accountable for their hurting us. No excuses. Anything else to me, is compassion preaching and playing the victim. Been there, done that, didn’t work for me.
My belief is that i am evolving from somewhere and towards somewhere. In doing so, i am perfect in the moment. So are you."
