Читать книгу Dorothy Rowe’s Guide to Life - Paula Nicolson, Dorothy Rowe, Dorothy Rowe - Страница 6

THE SECRET of life is that there is no secret.

All that you need to know about life is there for you to see. All you have to do is open your eyes and recognize what you already know.

However, down the centuries, many people wanting power have tried to keep the secret. They have created their theories and their jargon, and told us that they and they alone know the secret of life. These are the people who have claimed to be the wisest of the wise. They have called themselves philosophers, theologians, clergy, doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists, counsellors – in short, experts on life and living. Jungians say we are all part of the collective unconscious, while psychiatrists say that we are the product of our genes. Each of these theories is a way of describing and explaining certain parts of human experience, but no one theory can describe, let alone explain it all.

Some of these people have always known that there is no secret, while others have insisted that they and they alone know the Secret Truth About Life.

Down the centuries a few of these experts have dared to reveal that there is no secret, and, consequently, have been reviled by their colleagues. How dare such renegades say that each of us can sort things out for ourselves! How dare they threaten the experts’ power, prestige and wealth!

The experts always protect themselves by forming themselves into an elite and guarding the entrance with a formidable barrier of examinations and rituals through which only a chosen few can pass.

When the selected few do get through the barrier they are faced with a choice. Do you now tell yourself that you are initiated into the Secret Truth About Life? Or do you bear the disappointment of your discovery that what you might have is simply a collection of useful research results (for instance, we now know that babies are born with the ability to distinguish faces from all other phenomena) and, if you look for it, the kind of wisdom in living which has always been available to every generation.

Amongst the experts this wisdom has been more known than used. On the whole, the personal lives of experts are far from edifying. Some experts do live wisely but most (I’m speaking from years of observation) manage their lives no better than the rest of us. They’ve been so busy being experts they haven’t learnt what they need to know.

The secret which is no secret is that there is a body of knowledge which concerns how to live wisely. This wisdom is available to all of us. You don’t need a brilliant intelligence and a superb education to understand it, absorb it and use it.

However, just as we are all born artists, musicians, mathematicians and explorers and our upbringing and education take most of these abilities away from us, so we are born with the ability to understand ourselves and life, and the adults around us pour scorn on this ability and forbid us to use it. In learning to be good, obedient members of society we lose touch with the knowledge we need if we are to live our lives in ways which are rich and fulfilling.

A rich and fulfilling life is not one of unalloyed happiness. No amount of wisdom can defend us from loss, disappointment, old age and death, nor from the idiocies committed by those who have political and economic power.

However, such wisdom does ensure that we can live comfortably with ourselves and with other people. Being comfortable with yourself means that you are not forever thinking about and worrying about yourself, always prey to difficult and unpleasant emotions. Being comfortable with other people means that you are not afraid of others but can enjoy their company. There’s no longer a barrier between you and other people. No longer burdened with the sense of your own inadequacies, you cease to see the world as a cold, evil, disappointing place and instead become aware of the world’s infinite possibilities.

What follows here is not a list of Absolute Truths. The way we are physically constituted means that if there are any Absolute Truths in the universe we could not recognize one even if we stumbled over it. What we have are relative truths, conclusions we have drawn from our experience and which are always relative to our past experience and the situation in which we find ourselves.

We each have our own relative truths, and if we compare notes we can see that some of us have arrived at much the same relative truths. This suggests that perhaps we have managed to approximate that kind of relative truth which, in a random universe, turns up fairly frequently. We can then decide, if we were laying a bet, on which of these truths we would put our money.

Writing this kind of book creates for me the problem of which of the personal pronouns I should use. Should I say ‘them’ or ‘us’, ‘me’ or ‘you’?

Using ‘they’ and ‘them’ puts a distance between them and us (my reader and me) and sometimes I want to do this.

I use ‘we’ and ‘us’ when I’m talking about something which everybody is likely to do at some time or other.

I use ‘I’ and ‘me’ when I’m talking about some part of my own experience which may or may not be like that of other people.

When I use ‘you’ and ‘your’ I don’t mean that you, my dear reader, have had all the experiences or think in all the different ways which I am describing. No person could live so long or be so changeable. I am simply assuming that with some of my anecdotes about ‘you’ you will feel an identity. Others of these anecdotes are an invitation for you to make a leap of imagination into someone else’s world. ‘Ah, yes,’ you might think, ‘that reminds me of so-and-so. Is that what he thinks? I wonder.’

Understanding yourself and understanding other people are exactly the same process.