By survival instinct, it is suitable that certain doings of other men be resisted, (assault, theft). But to be free yourself, let other men be free to tell whatever stories they like, for once you recognize, for yourself – down into the gooiest marrow of your deepest neural bones – that everything in the life of man is either: doing or story-telling. You then get suddenly struck with the most obvious-of-obviousnesses – that the stories men tell from their mind, no matter how erroneous and insane your mind may find them to be – have no real impact on the life you actually lead.
II you are of nothing but ordinary-mind, their stories may certainly upset you, but step even slightly aside that reactionary area of your consciousness, and it is clear as can be that all of their outrageous ideas, beliefs, opinions, and theories are nothing but harmless story-telling, and can have no effect on your life unless you confuse them with doing. No man’s stories have any pertinence to your life whatsoever, unless you are so drowsy and distracted in consciousness as to confuse story-telling for doing-something, and thereby allow the story-telling to affect you.
Life is observably arranged for men to make no such distinction between doing and story-telling, and indeed, confusing the two can be seen as an integral ingredient in the full array of what he calls, progress, (both technological and cultural). It is clearly not intended that the consciousness of man-the-collective, be making constant mark of what is a doing-of-something, and what is simply a story-telling-about-something, (except in immediate survival threatening situations). A ceaseless, unnoticed intermingling of the two is as much a part of man’s standard life as is his clothing which, for collective, civilized conditions are a necessity, but for a recluse outside The City, an elective.
This possibility of choice never comes into play unless you first grasp the layout of the only field available for the game, and it is divided clearly into one area of doing, and another area of nothing but story-telling. The feature that most bamboozles is that the story-telling can be about doing, and be so dramatic and passionate that it is all too easy and natural for your thoughts to be totally swept up therein, and for doing and story-telling about doing to become indistinguishably intertwined.
This is man’s most common form of confusion;
the other variety is more devilish and difficult to see,
it is: story-telling about other story-telling.
J.