Act

I can be whomever I choose to be. Because our waking life has nothing to do with our actual state of being. We are lost in a dream. We are so lost that we do not even know that we are in a dream. This makes it possible to state this. Acting is possible. And therefore we know that we are within a dream. Else how could we experience free will? And because we experience it, it is very difficult for us to think that this experience is false. We cling on to this experience as if it were the only truth in a landscape of lie and illusion. We have come to know that at a large enough scale, everything is a lie. Nothing holds, nothing is deeper than the surface. and so we have to believe in our potential to be anyone we choose to be because without this delusion, nothing in this landscape is still or believable. We do not want to be disbelieving cynics. We want some real experience. And we want it so badly that we are ready to demean ourselves in any possible way to access it. Else everything is a lie. What does it even matter?

So every possible source of experience is rarified and brought into the scope of value. Of these the front pedlars have actually constructed an entire scene out of the chance operation of emergence to occur through the frame of performance. The back-pedlars have enjoyed the corollary benefits of ever knowing how or why they continue to exist.

The act is another such phantom container. It has the potential (like everything else) to lead to an experience. But this potential is not equally keyed and a disproportionate balance exists between the potential and the occurrence. The odds are of roughly a hundred is to one. Every hundred times the coin flips, there is a chance that once it will flip over. This is too slim a chance to gamble with. So we do not gamble culturally or religiously. We are conservative by default but sometime we might be a little less tight-fisted than others. It is a matter of degrees and not of absolute states.

Of course we can succeed but we can also fail.

And everything we do is some part success and some part failure.

That is the texture of an act. We can only orient ourselves to that scale of experience.