The Ape of Svengali

Musings with Old Friends : XVI

Monkey see, monkey do doesn't even begin to describe the way in which the mind observes itself in action and fashions a scheme of perception to help define and name the experience as his personality. This has been the great vocation of the mind and heart over the ages and is a signature to our identities. How else would we have done anything?

But in coming to a greater exercise of that experience in our relationships, it inevitably creates an exposure to issues that makes much of passe' in our appreciation of it. When we attempt to refine it, we are straddled with issues of being manipulative, scheming in our designs and apparently quite obnoxious eventually.

It is this response that makes many of us give up and wring our hands in despair. We need to overcome it with an understanding of what it is, do some careful research, know the alternatives and come to terms with reality in a new way. In doing so we stop offering apologies for what we perceived as the grand intelligence of man and stop hiding from what we thought were our promising expectations from the past.

It is a fond desire of the mind that it is doing everything and in other respects is a contributor to the grand architecture of the world and universe. We need to overcome the excruciating charge of it as being false and to rediscover our understanding of its phenomenon. The only true regret we come to experience in this process is how hard we have been on ourselves, needlessly.

We need to rediscover this in two ways. First to our individual witness of the developments. Next to take it out to the social environment and defend the theistic nature of our perceptions. Thereafter we come to affirm the existence of such schemes as nature's laws.

The passions have done much to help in duplicating viewpoints. In its euphoria it has shown much to us in terms of paradises, Godly men, angels and stars. We need to add to that an objective and independent account by our experience and then to find the correct expression for it in our lives that proves such experiences immutable. Svengali is what Svengali does.