For instance, I drew the plans for every market that I put in. I drew the plans for all my clients with my own hands. Laid them out, put the departments where they should be and allotted the space to them. I put the back rooms where they should be and allotted the space according to the operation, whether the man had his own warehouse or twice-a-week deliveries from somewhere else. I spotted all the plumbing and wiring that it took to operate the thing. Then we gave it to the architect, who in collaboration with the builders built a building around it and I built the fixtures that went in it. Then the operator put some canned goods and some meat in there and had a store. But that store came out of my head before it was ever on paper. We think and ourselves become the thing we think about. That is the way it is with our lives. We duplicate the Creator in our little world. And that’s the reason it behooves us to know what this thinking apparatus is.
A New Pair of Glasses, page 42. Emphasis added.
After that passage he talks about cause and effect: you don’t plant radishes and expect cucumbers. “As a man thinketh . . .” etc. and he notes the coldness of the equation.
You know it intellectually; you know you can’t plant radishes and get cucumbers. But you think you are above the law and you try to do a little controlling job on your thinking. You’re not getting back what you want, but you think you can think your way into getting it.
A New Pair of Glasses, page 43. Emphasis in original.
So what is it that I want? The inexorable law is true to my own satisfaction: “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”
To use the thinker machinery in me to think up a desire and think up the method for acquisition of that desire and to internally create the motive force to accomplish that desire and to achieve that desire and to declare mission accomplished for acquisition and full satisfaction of the desire . . . well, all of that is true because I have demonstrated that loop in my life, but it feels strangely incomplete, like one of those Escher infinite loop improbable drawings that initially seem to make sense yet on closer inspection obviously don’t.
Like the illustration troubles us (in a pleasing way—I like being unsettled by illogical logic in ways like M.C. Escher represented the world) I am troubled (but in an unsettling way) by the surface completeness of the infinite loop of an internal perpetual motion mental engine that thinks its way into creating a satisfactory life.
To quote the great philosopher Peggy Lee, “Is that all there is?” Am I a self-setting, self-accomplishing, goal-achieving self-propelled machine made of meat set on autopilot to careen through the universe? Poof! I appear at birth and then poof! I am gone. Is that all there is?
And I’m not joking by reference to Peggy Lee. (Actually, Lieber and Stoller, because they wrote the song.) Read the full lyrics to the song and tell me it’s not about the deepest human yearning of all: the search for meaning, for love. Here is the chorus:
Is that all there is?
Is that all there is?
If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is