Transcribed Talk by J. Jaye Gold
Have any of you who’ve been watching the Carl Sagan PBS Cosmos series that we have in our library downstairs seen number six yet? He presents the story of a Dutch scientist, an incredible explorer, discoverer, and thinker—a person of depth who dedicated his life, his actions, and his time to pursuits of what wasn’t known. He was a scientist. Our calling is really the same, it’s just that the dedication and the application are kind of falling behind. Here is this person who lived in the late 1600s, and he said there is life on Mars. I mean, he wasn’t Ray Bradbury. He was exploring his ideas. You, on the other hand, tend to be careful with your ideas. “Is this a good time for me to bring up my question?” That’s not exploratory.
You could be taking these new ideas we’ve been discussing and playing with them, formulating them according to the way that you see things and making them your own. Life is our laboratory. Apply these ideas and see how they synthesize with life. See if they prove out; see if they don’t. See if you have wonderings about them. If you only dabble, you’ll never recapture the exploration that took place in your first year of life. That wasn’t dabbling. If you watch a little child’s eyes, their eyes are like a magnet. Everything is, What does this mean? What does that mean? Mama is brushing her hair. What does it mean? She’s moving around. Why? Where to? A child’s eyes are looking for explanations and coming up with them to get a comprehensive package that encompasses everything.
You’ve spent however many years you’ve been alive developing a way of thinking, a way of looking at the world, a way of explaining the world—not in general, but in each and every detail. You have a comprehensive explanation for each and every thing that happens. If we’re looking for a new view of the world, then some of the time we’re going to have to both reexamine this old one, and then experiment and explore components of a new way of looking at the world—a new way of thinking about things.
If you’re taking on exploring a new science, an amount of application, dedication, and experimentation is necessary. A scientist basically equals a curious person. A curious person is a natural, relaxed person, in the way that a child is curious, exploring, wondering, “Why does it rain? Why is the frog green? Why are there no more dinosaurs?” We all have curiosity. We are human beings, and it’s our nature to be curious. But that curiosity has been covered up. We don’t see so much of what’s around us because, I’ve got to get over there and take care of that thing!
We can get some inspiration from hearing about explorers and scientists like this Dutch guy, for example, and the way he loved interesting discussions and put forth challenging and dangerous ideas for his time. He wasn’t afraid to explore things that he wasn’t sure of, and he made incredible discoveries along the way. Any way we can get there is fine. My way involved seeing the obstacles to something I knew was supposed to be natural for human beings: we weren’t supposed to have to fake it.
I knew how to fake it. I started to wonder, What’s forcing me to do this? Do I have an unnatural existence? Why am I afraid of what other people think? What’s going on in this moment? What are the obstacles to being myself? All those questions that came about because of my wanting to be free led me to be a scientist. The glorious thing about this Dutch guy was his exploration. The glorious thing about us is our capacity for the same. But think of where your energy normally goes—almost entirely to how you’re going to get by, with so little left for the glory of exploration. That’s really unfortunate. That’s a big loss.
Do you know what it takes to amend the U.S. Constitution? To talk about it in Congress is one thing, but to add an amendment… Do you know how many amendments have been added in two hundred years? It happens very infrequently, similar in a way to the frequency of amending our own personal, comprehensive package. This juggernaut is rolling down the road explaining everything. I know this. This means this. That means that. Nonstop. With this thing rolling down the road, what chance is there for you to interfere with its momentum? You have no chance unless you exercise application, dedication, perseverance, and consistency. It’s too big, too solid, too constant. It’s been prepared, fine-tuned, and honed over years. You know that line in the Dylan song, “when someone attacks your imagination”?[1] Well, you come up with an explanation. It’s a defense. You see a little shadow off in the distance, way over there. You look over and conclude, “Oh, it’s the sun,” or “Oh, it’s nothing,” or “It’s my guardian angel come down to talk to me.” Whatever you come up with, that takes care of it, and you go on to the next moment.
We need to intercede, interfere, interdict. Something is needed that will break this thing up and allow a chance for something new to come in. Perhaps you have an inkling that you may not have gotten the whole story or that your story is not giving you the fullest of lives. You want to let something new in and you can’t. How about discussing the hypothesis that there is life on Mars? Too many of your conversations with each other are about the problem of the moment. I’m not saying that none of them should be—I’m saying that some of them should be exploration.
We aren’t what we imagine ourselves to be, and things can’t possibly change unless we embark on an exploration of ourselves. Can we recognize and study our self-destructive tendencies? What do we know about our inability to love and care? Can we see our coldness, our numbness, our avoidance? We’re so busy dealing with our problems, plans, and relationships that we rarely recognize any of those things. We won’t be motivated to transcend unless we see that we’re not making it; we’re faking it. You might even find that you like this exploration, that you’re magnetized to it. I did, I was, and I still am. It’s fascinating to go from what you’ve experienced and heard and then try to figure out how things work. It’s not personal, but the bigness of things may be revealed to you.
[1] From Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” on Highway 61 Revisited.