On Santa Claus

Day 13

Do you believe in Santa Claus? If we believe in everything, then we believe in Santa Claus. But what does this mean? It means that we believe Santa Claus exists. It does not say how we believe Santa Claus exists. Perhaps Santa really is a large and jolly man with a big white beard who lives at the north pole with a bunch of elves and gives presents to good children on Christmas eve. Perhaps Santa Claus is an anthropomorphic representation of the spirit of generosity in the christian schema. Perhaps Santa Claus is a mental picture that represents the love that parents have for their children. Perhaps Santa is a spirit being that takes over the minds of people and makes them give gifts on Christmas. Perhaps Santa is a picture – like a word – of saint Nicholas. Perhaps Santa is all of these or none of these. However, he exists. I mention this because the word existence is often used in arguments that are very confusing to me. Someone might say that Santa exists – but you are talking about Santa, you have something in mind when you say that. How can Santa not exist? What most of us mean to say, in a phrase like that, is rather that Santa is not a large jolly man with a white beard who lives at the north pole with a bunch of elves and gives presents to good children on Christmas eve. That is what I think is in the mind of people who say something like that – a simple negative belief as to a way of existence for Santa Claus.

By saying that Santa Claus exists, by thinking about and talking about him, we are saying something like: the existence of Santa Claus is the case in the world. That Santa Claus is a gem in the world. If Santa Claus did not exist in any way whatsoever, then Santa Claus would not be in the world. If Santa Claus was not in the world, then he would not appear to us in any way and we would not be aware of his existence or nonexistence. Indeed, if he did not appear in the world, then we could not actually know that he did or did not exist, because we wouldn't know – that is, the knowledge wouldn't exist as a gem in the world – one way or the other. Thus, talking about and considering 'pure and bare and only existence' is a bit of a non-sequitur. It turns out that when we argue about existence and non-existence here, we are really arguing about is the relation of gem in our worlds. We are arguing about the logic in the logic field that is a world, and not about atomic facts in reality which I am not sure we have direct knowledge of anyway.

What is interesting to me is not disagreements between people about Santa Claus, but rather disagreements between ourselves. Imagine if you will a despondent youth in a field plucking flower petals saying “she loves me(pluck), she loves me not(pluck), she loves me(pluck), she loves me not(pluck)...” there he is in indecision, but the vision of events isn't so strange at all is it? You might be attracted to a girl and think that she is to you, but sometimes she ignores you, and sometimes she is mean to you, and sometimes she is kind, sometimes appearing to care and sometimes not. Sometimes helping you when you need and sometimes not being there too much. She might be just as confused as you after all about all of this.

Yet the youths heart soars in the happy times and falls in the lonely times. As he sits in bed thinking and thinking about his day, he interprets first one action of hers as being in a positive light towards him,and next as being in a negative light. His emotions go up and down, and he is never quite sure of what he believes is actually the case. Yet is not a never quite sure in the sense that he never comes to a decision – rather, he comes to many decisions at the same time, has many beliefs and is of many minds about what he believes is the case. A young lad in love can, after all, be both amazingly insightful, and amazingly foolish, often being both things several times in the very same day.

We can see the same activity in times of anger just as much as in times of attachment. As a clerk working at front desk of a motel dealing with all sorts of customers and situations, or hanging out with friends that maybe aren't the most perfect of people, being very imperfect yourself, you tend not to always interpret the same events in the same way all the time. A rude customer is often treated very differently than a polite customer, even though they may need the same action from you. A customer that asks a favor of you is much more likely to get that favor if you are not short on staff, not having technical problems, not already dealing with a fight in the parking lot, and not already short on sleep. A friend that makes a joke about you sometimes is hilarious,and sometimes is very annoying. Often these differences are because of my circumstances, not his. The same happens to us, when we fail to 'read the mood', when we fail to accurately recognize the situation that we are entering into. Yet what is it that makes these situations so different? I think that perhaps there are two types of situations. The first is where you don't recognize the world. These are times when you call down to the front desk of the motel and don't know that someone just threw a flower pot at my head, or that a report is overdue or that I already have four other people on hold. These are physical differences where I am normally ready and willing to respond to you in a helpful way, but something is in the way of that. These might be termed as situations of disruption from the outer world. If you knew what the world was like, if you knew what was going on, then you would probably react differently, and with a little bit of detective would you can probably figure out that most of these disruptions exist.

The other type of situation is a situation of inner disruption. This is when I am pissed off that day, or someone close to me just died, or I'm just an asshole, or I'm deliriously happy for some reason. When you call down to the front desk of a motel, or you tell a joke about a friend, you expect him to be in some sort of mood. To have some sort of general emotion that is not to different from what you expect him to have. We expect the motel clerk to be generally neutral, perhaps a bit stressed during a tough time but that is evened out by being happy to help during boring times. Or perhaps we have lucked into a happy-go-lucky clerk, or maybe a bitter person that hates this job. You can't always readily tell – there is an inner world which is determining something about how that clerk acts. The same is true for a friend – sometimes it is you, it is because you are being a jerk to your friend. (don't get me wrong that definitely happens a lot, but I do want to focus on the other side for now) Sometimes your friend is having a tough day, but doesn't want to show it, and you need to be a little kinder that day. Or perhaps your friend is having a tough day and just wants to hang around his pal, doing the same dumb stuff and hearing the same dumb jokes as always, in which case you should act as normal as possible. Yet, you can't always know which sort of day it is. That is, you can tell the joke but you can't always be sure that the audience will appreciate it. You can often make some very good guesses, but never really know for sure.

Turn now to the inner mind of the friend, to my inner mind if you will. What is it that makes a joke funny to me one day, and enrages me the next day? The way that I interpret the joke as existing as. That is, I do not have a different belief about the existence of the thing, the words I'm hearing, but I have a different interpretation. Do the words exist as a joke, or as an insult?

This is the same sort of reaction that me might have to the statement 'Santa does not exist' – what sort of phrase do I interpret this as? Am I sad because of the loss of innocence, proud because somebody is growing up, relived because I don't have to explain it, tense because I don't know if someone is about to cry? What I receive I interpret, I have a reaction to. My reaction and interpretation depend upon my world, depend upon the logic of the field and how things connect. Again we aren't concerned about absolute existence, but rather the way of existence.

There are, I think, two things that effect our interpretations the most. The first is the general form of our world, the structural limits suggested by our beliefs about what exists. If we do not believe in magic, then Santa Claus does not jump down chimneys. If we feel that childhood belief in Santa Claus is precious, then we view statements like 'Santa doesn't exist' negatively, but if we think that having a scientific view of the world is good then we can view it positively. A joke might be funny or insulting to us based on who is saying the joke, where in the world it is coming from, because we interpret the intention differently based on which gem it arises from. The other thing that effects our interpretations is our emotions. I might have the same general beliefs about what and how things exist when I am angry as when I am sad, but my reaction might be quite different. If the kid brings home a stray dog he found the day I just got fired, I'm probably going to react more negatively than if the kid brings home that same stray dog on the day I just got a promotion. When the kid looks at me and asks if I can keep it, do I say no angrily or happily? Do I want to calm myself down first, saying lets think about it tomorrow, or do the giant eyes of the kid calm me down instantly? A subordinate coming to me with a problem when I'm already dealing with thirty other problems is more likely to get a 'fix it yourself' reaction then if I am not already in crisis mode. Or perhaps the correct thing to do is to stop what I'm doing, take a deep breath, and carefully explain what to do – or that now is not a good time. The same can be for a friend who told a bad joke – do I strike back, be calm, walk off? It appears to me that our actions and visions are intertwined with our emotions. Emotions act as a sort of colored lens, whereas when we look at the world through that lens, some things are hidden and somethings are revealed. The way the world is changes.

I also tend to think that we can often have many different ways of interpretation at the same time. We are often conflicted about how to interpret a thing, and we often change our minds. It is, perhaps, like we are often of two minds about a thing, or three minds, or many minds. I tend to interpret this through the idea of emotion as like a color lens. Put on glasses that have one lens colored one way, and another lens color a different way. Or take two differently colored lens and put them on top of one another. Your vision become a bit strange. Its like you are looking at the world in two different ways, seeing two different worlds, all at the same time. The same thing happens when we look at the stars. The stars are at one and the same time sign's of grand majesty, the light of other heavens, burning fusion, messages from light-years ago, something we cannot ever reach, something that we will visit one day, and all other sorts of things. They can be animals in the sky, stories of our ancestors or mere hydrogen gas. We can think the same of a family – they are at once a gift and a burden, or think of a job as an opportunity for success and a danger of failure. It nuclear power as a weapon for evil or a source of light and heat. I say 'or', but I can mean that in either the excursive or the inclusive 'or'.

The exclusive or is when we look at something, interact with a gem, and see or deal with only one face of that gem. The inclusive or is when we see or deal with a gem's multiple faces. I tend to envision this as seeing with multiple heads at the same time, as we see with multiple or conflicted emotions. Conflicted visions of a thing are not in between visions, or colors that are somewhere in between red and orange, but are rather two visions at the same times – red and orange lenses. If we see a gem as different then we see a world as different. We can view the world as having only one face, or as having many faces. This seems to me to be almost like a multiple personality, a multiple personality for each of us. If the world is many-sided, then as we are part of the world, we too are many-sided. Multi-faceted and multi-headed.