"L'esprit de l'escalier – The Wisdom of the Staircase"

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Avoid entanglements.

 
 

1. Best Behavior

 
 
 
 

"Uh-oh! Trouble in paradise?"
—Avoid entanglements.
(–Source: taxi1010.com stargate06)

 

Unaware of, and driven by, a powerful hidden, or white, memory from my childhood, which had no obvious symptoms in my life, other than a total disregard for ordinary trappings, I took leave of Dartmouth College with two courses to go. I felt I'd earned it.

 

Years later I would take secret pleasure in Bill Gates dropping out of Harvard, and Tiger Woods dropping out of Stanford, because I felt in good company, even though their company was quite imaginary. Paul Allen, the cofounder of Microsoft, did ride in my taxicab a few years ago, talking on the cell phone a lot, and I would have said something to him had I not just been to the dentist. I kept saying, "Agh! Aghh!" and pointing at my mouth.

 

Earnestly recruited by a former salesman at IBM, where I had worked as a computer operator and junior programmer at an earlier leave from Dartmouth, I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and attempted to lead an ordinary life. I failed. My wife left me, (or her mother did a repo, I'm not sure which) and enduring huge emotional storms, stumbled into what I can only call a School for Jedi Knights.

 

"I know you're going to be skeptical."
—Avoid entanglements.

 

I decided, you know, no one's ever going to believe this, so I'm going to get proof and bring it back to the world. For one thing, when you read books such as In Search of the Miraculous by Petyr Demianovich Ouspensky, or The Sufis by Afghan writer Idries Shah, you are confronted by ideas which are simply baffling. For instance, There's another world, or level of existence, of which you have only had glimpses.

 

Maybe. I had already experimented with all the recreational drugs, and had grown accustomed to any variety of inner body experiences. Fierce in my determination to reclaim life without journeys up new veins, I met a man who didn't seem to mind.

 

I even tested him, more than once over a number of intervening years, and he never seemed to mind.

 

"You snooze, you lose!"
—Avoid entanglements.

 

"That would solve all your problems, wouldn't it?"
—Avoid entanglements.

 

Hmm. I actually do sense I should get some sleep. "Avoid entanglements" isn't such a good answer to that, now is it?

 

 

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