The Thing

Inspired by Goat Wisdom from The Camel's Back
The information contained within The Thing is not The Thing. *

The Thing

The Thing is always organic. Reduced to its intellectual value only, The Thing is rendered impotent, castrated in-the-act-of Reduction.
But why would The Thing ever be reduced to intellectual value? Why would anyone want to reduce anything to only a fraction of what it is? Ever.
In order to measure it or, at a minimum, define its boundaries ~To identify it as finite.
You could boil all that down to Fear of The Infinite, if you need a sound bite. But nothing is ever described accurately in so few words. The truer description has to arise within the listener in response to whatever the speaker has said.
Which, by direct implication, means that the speaker sows the seeds necessary for Truth?
No.
In your metaphor where Truth is a plant, The Thing sows the Seed, the speaker serves as Nutrient ~air, water, and sunlight~ and the listener, himself, becomes the Soil. If Truth is a flower, it blooms nowhere but within the listener.
That's lovely. But how does The Goat's original epigram * apply at all to my personal situation?
Fear of The Infinite.
Which became the answer to the question your Inner Voice raised, because you are the one who asked it.
“Fear of the Infinite”? I don't get it. Not at all, in this context.
We were talking about foibles and how impatient we all can be with one another, especially ourselves. It seemed to me ~SEEMS to me~ that my intractable impatience with my own stupidity and the sheer time involved in developing any particular new ability ~or eliminating counter-productive behavior, take your pick~ gets projected onto other people inside my own head. Because I become so disgusted with myself, it seems that on some emotional level I am not conscious of at the time I assume that everybody else is, too. Which, even if it were true, is not demonstrable at all. By definition, is irrational.
At least that is what I thought I was saying when he started talking about The Thing.
I want to see my way out of this loop I seem to be stuck within, responding not to other people but to my own unconscious projections ONTO other people. I know for sure that, personally, I would NOT be having that same sort of impatient reaction to someone else's similar struggle with what I've been doing, if I happened to be in that position.

You have been perceiving The Thing as infinite but yourself as finite. That has made the entire proposition terrifying and overwhelming. By oscillating into periods of emotional detachment from The Thing you attempt to redefine it as finite, to relieve your intense discomfort at feelings of inadequacy.
On a deeper level you realize ~correctly, in this case~ not only that emotional detachment takes a great deal of effort to maintain, but also that it is no solution and, if maintained for too long a time, would become the ultimate destruction of everything you seek for yourself and others. It is the conflict between your desire for Wholeness, which is Primary, and your need for relief from terror that oscillates you again into that desire which, in turn, leads directly back into Wholeness. Thus, anew begins the perceptual wave function.
At some point, you again become overwhelmed with perceptions of personal inadequacy, and detach emotionally, exchanging Wholeness for intellectual quantification. It is the ACT OF this detachment that “reduces The Thing”, so that you can view it as finite. Because your desire for Wholeness is Primary, no matter the degree of terror it will inform you on the true applied nature of emotional detachment, which ricochets you back into union with Wholeness.
The implicit problem in all this is that what you desire in The Thing does not exist within its informational value at all, not even partially, and when it is reduced you can only make contact with its informational value, not its organic wholeness. The sound bite here might be “a seesaw with terror at one end and isolation at the other”. You are a marble rolling back and forth as the seesaw moves, entering Wholeness only for the length of time you spend in the middle.
And so what I must do to end this continual repetition is to... what? Stop perceiving The Thing as infinite? How do I do that?
The Thing is infinite.
But that is what you were saying is behind the terror, right?
Listen to me. Ask yourself this question and then pay close attention to the answer: How can you begin to perceive yourself as infinite, as well ~which you are?
There would be nothing left to fear in The Thing. And when you can do that, the internal scale will be balanced ~the seesaw stops moving~ and you can rest within Wholeness indefinitely.

~from Dialogues III © August 2006, Sugarpie Rabbit
© 30 September 2006, Sugarpie Rabbit