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We can both do well

[ 5 minute read ]

Ever since I can remember words just pop into my head. Of course, I don't mean everyday words; I mean words I have no recollection of ever hearing or reading or otherwise coming across. Today, 'extant'. Since I don't know what it means I had to look it up. Unfortunately, because I was doing something else on my laptop I had to type it into my browser so I would not forget to hunt for the meaning. 

Extant: used to refer to something very old that is still existing. We have some extant parish records from the 16th century. 

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/extant

My 1962 publication of Roget's Thesaurus has it as an adjective under 'Existence, 'existing', perpetual and gives a few synonyms: standing, surviving, extant, undestroyed, undestructible

Near that entry is the word quidditative essential, subsistential, substantive. A wonderful word.

I can tell you that I harvested all that from the first entry in my Roget's thesaurus which pages have a peculiar smell to it, never been opened to that page in sixty-six years? Because I believe in weird stuff, like magic  and spells and spirits and stuff, I cannot help thinking I am supposed to find a clue to something, so I looked at the page again. I can't see anything that suddenly leaps out at me and shouts 'You found me, now let's act on it!' but I am a little spooked by this existence / non-existence thing. It might be simply a form of salutation. 'Hiya! Yup you are looking in the right direction for assistance with preventing your neighbour's spirit looming over you while you are sleeping and waking you up.' Oh, I hope so.

But this is the long-standing question, risen again from when I first encountered it at age sixteen when I was pretty miserable from domestic bullying. 'Which way would you like to choose, Martin?' I am not going to capture definitions of specific action within 'good' and 'evil'. But then, there was an experiment many years ago, testing to see if toddlers seated alone for a few minutes with a single sweet in front of them on a table would not eat that sweet when they were promised that they would very soon get a second one if they didn't. Most of them ate the sweet. The temptation was too much for them. I think it is evidence of a desire for immediate gratification. Just as it is neither good nor evil to eat the sweet, or give in to immediate gratification, eating metaphorical sweets is not always good for us either. 

My 'Leave me alone, neighbour!' could have future effects that are quite unfathomable to me today. In the past, I have visited my mother and stayed the night. She always went to bed before me. What we need to understand at this point is, by this time she had bought her own house and none of us children had grown up in it. It was in her mind her house and not a shared one. When I later went to bed I had the worst sleep ever. I woke unrefreshed and tired. One day I thought I would test a theory; does her spirit come out of her body and inhabit the house while she sleeps. I visited her and went to bed and got to sleep before her. I slept well and woke lively. I asked her how she slept.

       'Terrible,' she said. 'I tossed and turned all night.'

Hmm, it seems either I deliberately barred her from good sleep or stopped her spirit from barring me from good sleep. I cannot leave that resultant thought out of my life, which is why I want to eat the metaphorical sweet on the table. I want immediate gratification because I do not know the future. I don't know if my neighbour will move out next week. I suppose some people would be going down a line of thinking to do with 'manifesting'. To me, that is not much different to what I have in my mind. Yet, if I go to bed before my neighbour I am still woken when he, I guess, falls asleep and reaches a particular stage in his sleep, around about a quarter past eleven, and two and four. It seems to me to be fairly periodic and, from what I know, so are the sleep stages.

Looking inward. I have been told I do not snore but do I now? Well, when my neighbour is away for a week or two I sleep fine, so... is this an anxiety thing? Certainly, he troubles me. I mean I am scared of psychopathic ogre monsters; I would be, I had a brother just like that, hence the question that was asked of me when I was sixteen, 'Which way would you like to go? or 'How do you want to handle this?' As a teenager I was saturated by born-again Christianity in my village, All the kids were doing it. I couldn't help thinking that it would bleach out a lot of my life. Plainly, I was more in the spirit world than I thought.

I like the richness of the spirit world. i don't like the doctrine of Christianity which I have a sneaking suspicion 'manifests' in its own way; it just takes longer and requires a lot of re-moulding and hard work for the rest of people's lives. I suspect that  is often overlooked; you don't just get a membership badge with Christianity. Yet, taking out a loan from the spirit world could have interest payments that may spiritually bankrupt me. If I consider that a financial advisor works hard to maintain a level of understanding of current financial and fiscal policies and trends, and I consider a borrower as someone who does not work hard to understand and continue to understand the markets or governments, I am definitely the latter when it comes to spiritual matters. I like the fun and frilly bits; the toffee-apples and cake. I don't think I want something that is able to follow me from room to room in my home, and isn't stopped from entering my home by a locked and barred front door, collecting a spiritual debt. I know that if something is moved from there to here, there is a hole that needs to be filled.

And there is the question again. It has never gone away and I could solve a lot of my problems by becoming an adept in either camp. But, immediate gratification? Not today or even this year, and how patient am i?

The overall point here, which I have really only washed onto canvas, is, it comes down to belief. I believed if I went to sleep before my mum in her home I would sleep better, and I did sleep better. I also believed that she would not sleep well, and she did not sleep well. Now, I want to go back and try the experiment again; this time I would believe that we would both sleep well. 

       'By Jove, I think he's got it!'