I see, yeah, you're right. I was just assuming we all do remember the more important things of our past anyways, so why keep the focus on our past still?

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By memories we create experience. By experience we move on.

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Practice creates experience and memory saves our experience, yes you're right. That's very important indeed, but I think we normally take this experience with us anyway. I might be focusing on 'experience' a bit too much now, but I don't see how we can forget about the more important things of our past even if we would ignore them from now on so to speak.

The gained experience will (mostly) still be there, even if only in our subconscious, because we tend to remember a lot more than just the 'visual memories'.

Cheers

It is the third day and the little door is still there. Every fish now knows, that he has his very own "truth". Some fishes however love the truth so much, that they start to collect different pieces of truth - even from different times - and while they are playing around with two of them, they discover a set of keys.

The name of the first key is "logic".
The name of the second key is "history".

There is indeed an old complex lock in the door, where the keys seem to fit. The third seal is falling and the name of the seal is "justice" and it appears the spirit of ambivalence and he comes with words from a book:


"Most of us may not believe in the story of a Devil to whom one can sell one's soul, but those who must know something about the soul (considering that as clergymen, historians, and artists they draw a good income from it) all testify that the soul has been destroyed by mathematics and that mathematics is the source of an evil intelligence that while making man the lord of the earth has also made him the slave of his machines. The inner drought, the dreadful blend of acuity in matters of detail and indifference toward the whole, man's monstrous abandonment in a desert of details, his restlessness, malice, unsurpassed callousness, moneygrubbing, coldness, and violence, all so characteristic of our times, are by these accounts solely the consequence of damage done to the soul by keen logical thinking! Even back when Ulrich first turned to mathematics there were already those who predicted the collapse of European civilization because no human faith, no love, no simplicity, no goodness, dwelt any longer in man. These people had all, typically, been poor mathematicians as young people and at school. This later put them in a position to prove that mathematics, the mother of natural science and grandmother of technology, was also the primordial mother of the spirit that eventually gave rise to poison gas and warplanes.
The only people who actually lived in ignorance of these dangers were the mathematicians themselves and their disciples the scientists, whose souls were as unaffected by all this as if they were racing cyclists pedaling away for dear life, blind to everything in the world except the back wheel of the rider in front of them. But one thing, on the other hand, could safely be said about Ulrich: he loved mathematics because of the kind of people who could not endure it. He was in love with science not so much on scientific as on human grounds. He saw that in all the problems that come within its orbit, science thinks differently from the laity. If we translate "scientific outlook" into "view of life," "hypothesis" into "attempt," and "truth" into "action," then there would be no notable scientist or mathematician whose life's work, in courage and revolutionary impact, did not far outmatch the greatest deeds of history. The man has not yet been born who could say to his followers: "You may steal, kill, fornicate - our teaching is so strong that it will transform the cesspool of your sins into clear, sparkling mountain streams." But in science it happens every few years that something till then held to be in error suddenly revolutionizes the field, or that some dim and disdained idea becomes the ruler of a new realm of thought. Such events are not merely upheavals but lead us upward like a Jacob's ladder. The life of science is as strong and carefree and glorious as a fairy tale. And Ulrich felt: People simply don't realize it, they have no idea how much thinking can be done already; if they could be taught to think a new way, they would change their lives."



This is a very small extract from a monumental book, written over a period of ca. twenty years between the two world wars: "The Man without Qualities".
Robert Musil, the author, born in Austria-Hungary described the overall mood of the society in 1913 - just one year before the first world war.
This was basically a period in history, which was revolutionized by the new discoveries in natural science (Freud, Darwin ...), a belief in progress and human cleverness, which was shaking the peoples belief in God - especially among the elites - like never before.
The people are searching for a (new) great and unifying idea in order to celebrate the birthday of the emperor Franz Josef. Of course everyone has a different opinion about this. For every opinion there is an opposing opinion. No agreement is possible.
The main character, a mathematician, realizes this, and - looking for perfection - he can´t take anybody serious and he refuses to take position.
The book ends unfinished (Musil died in 1942), the last chapters however describe a mystic experiment in love.
There is no clear "message", just some little hints, hidden in Musils unpublished works, fragments like:

"If the non-correct gets the upper hand: war." *)
or
"Everything happens."
or
"All lines are leading to war."

*) like Tolstoi in "War and Peace", Musil believed, that it is not so much the leaders, but the general mood of the peoples, that makes war almost inevitable.

I leave it open here. Well, this was an encounter with the terrible spirit of ambivalence.

@ Larry: Next message will be shorter

Four seals remain.

Phe: When you get into a situation you don't know what to do, your first reaction will be "what to do.. what to do.." then you go inside yourself try to remember similiar situation, whereareas you're seeking the past to find your way to the future.

Also when you don't have any past experience in any like, then you will seek the past in a way too. You try to mix your skills learned in the past to move on.

Lol, i'm starting to think you are right and that the point I was trying to make isn't quite valid, but you seem to indicate a certain predestine flow of decision-making. I find that pretty weird, although I do see where you're coming from.

(Ow noes more rants?!; )
Sure, we've all got our own experiences or the experiences of others we trust to base our actions upon, but everytime a new event presents us with the question what to do next, it's really a choice you are making. You can actually decide what to take into consideration, past or no past. Without a past you don't really have a choice but to simply choose without experience. This happens WAY more than you'd think.

Do we really base our opinion and way to act on our past? I don't think so. What's that famous line again? Something about "mistakes" and making them "over and over again". Well, people don't do that for no reason, there's simply no rule that demands us to make the same choice for the same problem ahead.

Furthermore the way I see it, choices are usually representations of possibilities and changes, no one has a past in which he or she has experienced everything already, so it's often a live and learn process. Not everything is new perhaps, but often you will be challenged with situations you have not been in before. In such a situation I would really look at the future in case of deciding either way. What would have disadvantages, what would have a big impact, more or less do some educated predictions. Purely based on logic you'd come far enough.

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Also when you don't have any past experience in any like, then you will seek the past in a way too. You try to mix your skills learned in the past to move on.

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Yes, but only because you will have to observe your present situation, make your conclusions and go from there. That's nothing strange to me though, I'm doing that everyday actually. Besides, does a past really matter? There's always the future to decide differently than you did. There's only one person capable of changing your life and that's yourself. Why worry about wrong choices? As long as your knowledge about morals and stuff are okey, practically nothing can go wrong and there are no problems without solutions anyways,

Cheers

It´s okay to be spontaneous and if someone is short on experience, because he isn´t that old, making some mistakes is simply necessary. And it´s also fun. Who would like a life, where there is at every corner a policeman, who says: stop, you are going to make a serious mistake, that has been made a million times by others?

The other thing is: people have different forms of intelligence. Some people are very good at well defined, step-by-step logical thinking, but not so good, when it comes to making associative links.

For me this is something, that I trained over many years in my worldly job as an editor.
I get a huge amount of raw material: filmed life (sounds, moving images) in a chaotic form ... and I have to select, transform, and bring it down to stories, that make "sense", that have a beginning and an end. It´s like solving puzzles. There are almost no rules, but there are abstract established patterns, which can work for different situations too. I can edit a documentary film about an African drummer and apply a pattern from Coppolas "Apocalypse Now". There are theories about the dramatic structure.

Movies, stories, myths are often not just entertainment, they are patterns for our behaviour and patterns to help us understand, what´s going on. But the audience has to be able to apply them to his own slightly different reality.

Something similar does apply to history. I see it like a story, that helps me understand reality. There is however an old saying: "History is a language, one in which the dead talk to the deaf."

Life writes little stories into the human memory, and one can transform them into blueprints, in order to recognize a slightly different situation. There are general experiences (like birth ...) that everyone makes. Everyone has a desire for love.
Life - for me - is like a very old piece of theatre, with me as the main actor. At the beginning I think, I´m the first one and this piece has been written only for me. Because I´m fascinated by the effects, the colors, the outer appearances. The costumes, the stage setting, everything looks very modern and original. But the blueprints behind this are as old as mankind and our lifes are just a variation of this.

The fourth day is not very spectacular, the seal of emptiness fades away on its own initiative, no spirit appears and a spirit, that doesn´t really exist can say only nothing.


Three seals remain.