The Concept Of The Humdrum

More Dolphin Warnings

I have been thinking recently about pious sayings, humdrum and mundane, and how sickeningly cloying they are. I have not actually been thinking about dolphins, although those mammals will make an appearance here shortly. It strikes me that the feeling of annoying familiarity is not a good way to evaluate things. It is a statement of one's feeling, and even though such a statement may often be a proposition much "truer" than many other types of statements which do not deal with the private realm of emotions, we tend to think of such "feeling" statements as decor and window dressing for the real business of the world. Consider this from BeliefNet: http://www.beliefnet.com/Inspiration/2008/12/Inspiration-from-The-Dolphin.aspx Following Your Dreams

"The Dolphin" is an enchanting tale of courage, and rising above fears and limits. A lonely dolphin named Daniel Alexander Dolphin sets out to fulfill his destiny and learns that to achieve his goals he must not only act, but dream, and not only plan, but believe. The wisdom he acquires can inspire we humans as well:

"There comes a time in life

when there is nothing else to do

but to go your own way.

A time to follow your dreams.

A time to raise the sails of your

own beliefs."

What is a dream? What is its pedigree and history in the individual?

Why is a dream, a symbolic structure of the Future - which does not "exist" yet - so important to the Present?

And if it is a dream you have had for a long time, its memory extends into your personal history, or into the Past.

Why does your dream link the Past, Present, and the Future?

Is it this linkage which is the source of its power?

Then there is this:

"Never forget: When you’re just about to give up,

when you feel that life has been

too hard on you,

remember who you are.

Remember your dream."

Why is the Dream stronger and more enduring than the "you", the person experiencing life?

Why is a symbolic structure of consciousness more enduring than a "real person"?

One approach: remember you are but a player on the stage, a bit player in an infinite production. One hundred years from now, what difference will it make?

Or, in another approach, Heracleitus says the God does not do things with a sense of urgence or importance, rather He plays. We are all players. Even the sleeping and the dead touch reality and partake in reality. And the play is the stuff of the universe.

I think that we may dislike the simplistic messages above, because I sense that our rational outlook on the world accomplished this: it adored rationality so greatly that it set up an Idol of Rationality in Mathematics and established mathematical economic models which were not understood, but were taboos and powers before which we knelt in an undisguised total ignorance we called "efficiency", "invisible hands", "inherent wisdom", etc.

Our Rationality destroyed the world of Spirit. The Spiritual World is an integral part of reality, along with the Real World. What our ancestors called Spirit was the world of symbolic structures, upon whose Memory we stand, upon whose content we work in the Present Immediate, and whose gravity in the Future pulls us to our destiny, whether it be the Paradise we build with our good works, or the Hell we build with our arrogance.