Similarity in the celestium
Today’s thoughts on similarity (inspired by Christmas friction):
Throughout Clara’s celestium (Salt Island Diaries) awarenesses of every conceivable type are scattered. Awarenesses that are attracted to like awarenesses form poles of attraction (heavens). Awarenesses that are annoyed by like awarenesses do not. However, the latter may not escape: what it means to be in a reality is to share it with other awarenesses that are similar enough to perceive it the same way. If a person is alone in perceiving a reality, he is considered crazy. Realities are shared, and if they are shared by beings who bother each other, they are hells.
There are more ways for things to be dissimilar than similar, and this only increases as complexity increases. Any awareness complicated enough to talk about it is going to perceive much more dissimilarity than similarity. Most of that dissimilarity is going to be disharmonious because there are simply more ways to be disharmonious.
There is so much hell, there is a temptation to consider Hell to be the default condition. Heavens are fantasies.
What the Diary dreams taught me is that waking reality is very much part of general reality, in that there are many hells and very few heavens — but both are possible. The only impossibility is to avoid working on one or the other.
> Awarenesses that are attracted to like awarenesses form poles of attraction (heavens).
An alternative theory: perhaps awarenesses can be too similar. Opposites attract, so they say; or, conversely, likes repel. I never understood the former, but I can recognize the latter. Too much similarity might be a barrier to success, whereas if you are slightly less similar — at least dissimilar Macken — it might be easier to work together?
> Opposites attract, so they say; or, conversely, likes repel.
That’s why your former lovers were all short, fat, stupid, and slovenly — religious fundamentalist, Tory, racist, misogynous… No, really, one has to do with similar people, but makes much of the residual differences.
You might be wondering why dominant people attract submissive people. It’s rather that they repel everyone else. Submissive people are otherwise fine with watching television and eating snacks. They don’t pine to be pushed around (BDSM is obviously a special case). When they do pledge fealty to a dominant person (usually to resist a less preferable domination), it’s not a pole of attraction. It’s some organization that operates by coercion. It is no heaven.
The folk wisdom of “opposites attract” is a fortune cookie that one receives in a hell. Why? Tidy people do not adore messy people. Tidiness is rather a point of friction. “Opposites attract” really means that people are so complex and multi-faceted, that one is unlikely to to find a match across all dimensions. Where there is a difference, there is something opposite, contrary, in opposition. And therein lies the difference between a heaven and a hell. In a heaven, non-functional differences are orthogonal, not oppositional.