Wisdom of the Idiots: Part 34

Wisdom of the Idiots: Part 34; Upstairs Downstairs


“Good morning. May I help you . . . are you okay? . . . you’re looking a bit piquy.”
“I’m just a bit confused. One moment I was talking to the Father and the next I’m here.”
“Ah, no contract, am I right? We get a lot of that down here. Happens all the time.”
“You know about that? There are others?”
“Others? Are you kidding? I’ve got more contracts than you can shake a pitchfork at. Busy isn’t the word. And there’s all you homeless vagrants to sort out. I don’t know. No contract – imagine it!”
“Homeless people? Vagrants?”
“Of course homeless. Of course vagrants. I mean, where do you live? Got any money? Got anything lined up – where to go, and that? No? Like I said – homeless vagrants.”
“Well, I thought that I’d have a mansion in the Father’s house and live there . . . but, well, it’s all turned out rather differently to what I imagined from reading the books. The parables, you know.”
“Parables? Ah yes. A bit tricky they are. Most people just don’t get them but they’re really just analogies. Never read Korzybski, did you? No, thought not. Ah well.”
“I thought it was all real. You know, mansions in my Father’s house; demons sticking pitchforks up my arse forever, and so on.”
“No, they’re just analogies. You know, to give you an idea of the thing in a descriptive way.”
“So none of it’s real, then?”
“The analogy is real.”
“I meant about having a mansion and all that.”
“Look, we can create an analogy to describe a thing, but the thing described may be no more than a notion in the mind, an electro-chemical event with no other physical existence. Just like they’ve done in the Mahabarata, for example, we can make an analogy of the essential ‘unity’ or ‘oneness’ of the individual raindrop and the sea to communicate the proposition that all matter and all life are essentially ‘one’ but that does not mean that the proposition itself is true. Think of it as a highly localised zero-mass event in non material space-time and you’ll get the idea. It remains merely a proposition no matter the usefulness of the analogy as a description of the inherent qualities of the subject of the analogy. The causal connection between the raindrop and the sea, and the process of ultimate re-absorbtion described by the analogy, is observably true – but it is true only of the raindrop and the sea. It is not proof of the validity of the proposition, merely descriptive of it.”
“I see what you mean. No analogy is perfect – if it were it would be the thing itself – and within the imperfection we often . . . .Okay, I get that. Any analogy made would still be subject to my personal interpretation, influenced by desire, fear, and . . . ”
“Yes, and the terms within the analogy would necessarily be familiar and appropriate to you as raindrops and seas were to readers of the Mahabarata – reward and punishment in your case, of course, and as you haven’t currently got a housing contract . . . well, speaking of causal connections, I’m sure the causal connection with homelessness is obvious here so we shan’t go on about it. Besides, I’m very, very busy.”
“Well I’ll be damned!”
“Yep. Now let’s see if we can find a place for you.”

Musashi.