What is it that men do not see? What needed insight is the mind missing that must be right in front of it? Well…not quite, “right in front of it.” It IS it.
Everything that lives is a doorway; a passage between their insides and their outsides; a conveyor and transformer of energy; in-out, out-in, in-out, out-in, in-out. Everything that lives, is a doorway between their genes and their environment; a passageway between their internal heredity and the external conditions.
Man, too, is a two-way swinging door between his insides and his outsides, but also having a mind, he can ponder the activity passing through him, and propose theories about crippled ones. The theories keep a’comin’.
While on vacation, a man decides to go on a diet. After driving home nonstop all night, he arrives hungry, and discovers nothing in the house but peanut butter – something not on his new list of acceptable foodstuff. How did the peanut butter get in his pantry? What was the causative factor in his buying it – his genetic makeup, or perhaps it was conditions at the store whereat the treat was on sale at such a low price that the bargain made it irresistible?
So, here he stands at three in the morning, ravished with hunger and no nearby store open; what to do? If he does, (in spite of his recent decision not to eat such food), succumb and partake thereof, what was responsible for him doing so: a weakness in his genetic construction, or the power of the situation’s conditions?
If you want to see the answer to this captious puzzler you have to stretch – and keep stretched – your mind, in an unnaturally extended configuration where you are not focused merely on the picture of the instant moment, but are reining in snippets of snapshots from both sides of a swinging door.
J.