Everyone with sane DNA cares about staying alive. Everyone has their individual intangible interests such as sports, music, movies, and other matters of a mentally entertaining nature, but ordinary men are also wired up to give attention to intangible creations of their own mind, which they subsequently take to be of a quality far removed from mere entertainment.
Humans take, quite seriously indeed, such ideas as: “Men live again, as men, after they die; what other people think about me has significance to my life; what other people believe about life, compared to what I believe, is significant to me; I am what I think – thus are ideas in general of particular significance to my life.”
These concerns, (along with their lesser, internal variations), occupy an ever increasing portion of routine men’s speech, and attention, and this is obviously, (as witnessed by the fact that this is how it is), how life wants it, and for everyday people this is neither hot nor purple. But for a man who wants to get his hands on the understanding, (or perhaps in the alternative, have it grab him by the clavicle), this matter is of GREAT IMPORTANCE! Or, in the alternative, worth maybe…ten seconds of an alert man’s time. If you think-about, and are concerned over the same things that everyone else is, you will never leave the ranks of “everyone else.”
To have the-understanding-of-what’s-going-on, is to realize for yourself that the only thing of any significance going on is living. If politics is important to you, then politics is important to you. If what people say about you is important to you, then what people say about you is important to you – but X is X. If you look at X and call it Y – it is Y. If someone else looks at X and calls it Z – it is Z. But it is still X.
This is what having-the-understanding makes impossible to any longer ignore. It gravely interferes with a man’s ability to continue pretending that there are some things in the realm of things-you-can’t-touch that are of extreme, if not supernatural, importance. (Like maybe Santa Claus’ TRUE birthday!)
J.