Tomorrow’s Wisdom

Life itself is a mixture of power and form, and will not bear the least excess of either. To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step in the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.

It is not the part of men, but of fanatics or of mathematicians, if you will, to say, that, the shortness of life considered, it is not worth caring whether for short a duration we were sprawling in want, or sitting high. Since our office is with moments, let us husband them. Five minutes to-day are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, to-day. Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as I they were real: perhaps they are.

Men live in their fancy, like drunkards whose hands are too sot and tremulous for successful labor. It is a tempest of fancies, and the only ballast I know, is a respect to the present hour.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote those thoughts in his 1844 essay, Experience. Emerson had the ability and the sense to see today for what it is and tomorrow for what it can be. There is infinity in each moment and infinite versions of the self in a moment, but we only focus on one. Various scales of awareness contain their own infinities no matter how finite they appear.

The blueprint for reality is firmly set on a platform of probabilities and each probable system has its own set of blueprints. There are no inner images of perfection in these blueprints since in a sense the blueprints change. We all carry a set of blueprints that are designed to bring about the most favorable version of the focused self in the probable system we are aware of. Within the vast inner mind of the species is a set of these blue prints which can be considered working plans or probable actions.

The next millennium appeared invisible to Emerson but he wrote about it because he accepted his role in it in a probable self sort of way. Emerson had the ability to focus on more than one reality at a time and he created probabilities from his own set of blue prints. He moved through probabilities like we move through space. He didn’t calculate how to do it or for that matter he didn’t explain how he did it. Like walking from one end of the street to the other he just did it.

We are the recognized result of all the decisions we have made in this life up to this point. We are not affected or diminished because other official selves are experiencing the choices we did not make and then choosing, alternative versions of reality. Our species has many characteristics and abilities that go unnoticed because we don’t accept them as part of our spiritual or biological heritage. They become latent and invisible until we expand our awareness and recognize the blue print of probabilities that exist within us and begin to manipulate them.

Like Emerson we can experience far greater dimensions of this blue print of probabilities when we realize that we are denied tomorrow’s wisdom only because we believe time is a closed system.