"Idiots and Machines"

That's What you've got to say to people; that's the lesson you've got to teach the young. You've got to persuade everybody that all this grand industrial civilization is just a bad smell and that the real, significant life can only be lived apart from it. It'll be a very long time before decent living and industrial smell can be reconciled. Perhaps, indeed, they're irreconcilable. It remains to be seen. In the meantime, at any rate, we must shovel the garbage and bear the smell stoically, and in the intervals try to lead the real human life.

-- Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point

I won't say much about the book itself since we'll do plenty of that in the coming month or so, but I can't say enough how much I love the book and how much my life has been changed as a result of the ideas of Huxley.  Here, the character Mark Rampion sits in Sbisa's (a restaurant/bar) speaking to his friend, Maurice Spandrell.  Rampion believes he's figured out the secret to living, which he tries to extend to Spandrell who has tried just about every different philosophical view looking for meaning and purpose, and ultimately proof that God actually exists (which he later tries to prove to Rampion aesthetically, but we'll cover that later).  

Rampion argues, in essence, that man must live a life of strict dualism -- the mechanistic life of capitalist society in his working hours, and the "real and complete" human life in one's leisure.  As a result of this view, it would seem that man spends 1/3 of his day as something other than himself, 1/3 as himself (potentially -- I'm not sure I'm convinced entirely that 'leisure' is where one is a real human being necessarily), and the last 1/3 (if one is lucky enough to have normal hours) asleep. If we apply this to the sum total, that still qualifies as over half one's life lived being not-oneself (if you account for weekends, vacations, childhood, and retirement, generally).  That seems like a horrible waste of time, to me.

We talked today about the difference between waste and expenditure first period.  Doing one's work can be viewed either way -- as an expenditure of time and energy, or as an utter waste.  Rampion's view above, suggests that it is a waste -- something only to be done that is meaningless in order to get to that which we deem meaningful:

Nobody needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it, already there.

If I only knew who in fact I am, I should cease to behave as what I think I am; and if I stopped behaving as what I think I am, I should know who I am.

What in fact I am, if only the Manichee I think I am would allow me to know it, is the reconciliation of yes and no lived out in total acceptance and the blessed experience of Not-Two.

-- From the island of Pala's treatise, "The Notes on What's What"

Aldous Huxley, Island

Huxley's true position is given in his final novel, published posthumously in 1963 called Island, where he rectifies the dualism explained by Rampion in the previous example.  Rampion advocates for the Manicheeistic dualism that Pala here rejects -- he believes that we must by necessity split ourselves in half and be two people (or one person sometimes and a machine the other times), and only live or those times when we get to be the full person. Above, the document of Pala explains that we should know who in fact we are -- and this includes ALL experience, not just the experience of our 'full and complete' selves in leisure, because this is actually NOT in fact full and complete at all.  Leisure is only part of the equation, and an incomplete one at that. Instead, we must learn to accept all experience.

The key here is the conscious perception involved; we can choose to view our lives and our time as half a waste, and half meaningful.  OR, we can choose to view ALL of our experiences -- good, bad, indifferent -- as meaningful.  Am I always going to like the things that happen in my life? No.  Am I always going to find pleasure or interest in all the things that happen in my life? Maybe not -- but again, it's a personal choice.  I can always choose to find value in everything that happens.  I can choose to value the loss of a friend who may not have really been a friend -- there is something to be gained in that experience, even if its just knowledge for the next time I try to make a friend, or meet someone like that individual. I can choose to find value in the chemistry class I had in college, where my teacher was fun but not exactly effective in helping me learn chemistry, and thus I had to teach it to myself -- I gain the knowledge and self-confidence that I can succeed in a situation where the odds were more-or-less stacked against me.  I can choose to view the pain of waiting in line at the DMV for hours only to be sent home many ways.  I can view just about every experience I have in many ways.

So really, I guess it's a matter of personal choice, a type of yoga of life, where I pay attention to the "here and now," to the moment, to the awareness of all the values that can be given to anything I experience, to find value in all of my experiences. It's not even just about personal purpose and meaningfulness; it's about making every one of my twenty-four hours an expenditure of time and energy, and not just a 'waste.'