Well, you have to listen to the talk for the answer. When is a knot a measurement of a boat’s speed or a tangle in a rope? What does MU! mean? What do you call the chapter’s in your Book of Life. Do you have as book? Do you know you are writing your story, chapter by chapter; have you named come up with metaphorical titles for each stage of your life?
I speak from the advantage of having lived long enough to have many chapters. But even if you are half way through, that doesn’t mean that can’t get a sense that the whole book is in every chapter, every page, and even sentence for that matter.
What is the driving question of your life, your book? Mine was “How can I be or service? I asked God. I asked people. I asked two yogi Guru’s. I asked bosses, employers, my children and my wife….and all I got was MU! (metaphor warning)
No one can tell you how you can be of service, of use, having purpose and meaning. No one. You have to live on a houseboat that is not a boat or a house. The houseboat is a metaphor. You have to live as a metaphor.
How can you live as a metaphor? A metaphor points to the facts of you book, the l literal historical facts with one finger, and it point to your greater story, the untold (but told), the incomplete (but complete) story of your Soul’s journey. This journey when told in facts, in history has no meaning. It’s a sad tale told by idiots, signifying nothing…but the Story of your Soul is the romantic journey of a hero/heroine, that of a god and goddess. The greatest story every told.
But you have to live on a houseboat that is neither a house or a boat.
Unless we can understand ambiguity we cannot understand life, and if we cannot understand life we cannot understand ourselves. And if I can’t understand myself, I am the walking blind. But even if I understand myself, I don’t understand myself. I am ambiguous. So how can I cope? How can you cope? Nothing is what we think it is, and yet it is. I fall back on my default gestalt image to get me out of a semantic fix. Is the image a houseboat or a boat? A Hag or a Princess. What is the One that both images are? There must be One, you know. Reality is not two, unless you are Schizophrenic. Reality is not a split screen like on CNN. Which is it, Hag or Princess. You must choose.
Can you feel the pressure…you have to choose but you can’t. You either burn up the picture, throw it on the ground and stomp on it or step of the Pirates Plank and discover a new but whole you that is not ambiguous, yet not unambiguous. Where is that Still Point, that Silent Night, where there is no ambiguity? That point is what we yearn for, long for, search for…but you can’t find it. You must fall into it as if by accident. But only after you struggle for it with all your heart and mind.
We have chapters in our life where we have turning points, just a sudden change when you ask your heart what you really want to do. When we look back over the chapters of our life, there is an ambiguity: did I make that decision or is there an author of me that I don’t know. Am I writing me or am I being written?
I wrote a screenplay called The Blood Dharma. The protagonist was a high caste warrior who was outcast, and the antagonist was a Scottish man who came from a low background, but rose to power through the British East India company. So the question was, what does a man whose life has been predetermined do when set free? When a man of Destiny confronts a man of Progress? Of course, the joke is on them. Because ultimately, do they do whatever I choose for them to do, or does their fates emerge from their characters’ interaction organically?