For the past several weeks, we have been looking at a new way of seeing who we are. A couple of loose ends today, and then next week we’ll start looking at what the implications are for the way we lead our lives. Subsequently, we’ll look at society and the individual, and then what the guys call the challenge of our time.
A larger perspective
I often do my thinking on paper, sitting with pen and journal. As I do (and as you do) the guys upstairs are there to help provide a larger perspective. As they put it once, “You can do the detail while we hold the larger vision, you see?” Immediately they said that, I realized it. Obvious, once they suggested it. As they put it, when we in 3D work, we work three inches from the surface of whatever mosaic we’re working on, while they stand back remembering the entire pattern as it is meant to be seen. We do detail, they do pattern, and it all goes well.
A society of our selves
I had a vision once of my joining a party, sitting at a table with room for many people but few or none actually there – then plop, plop, plop people began to appear in various chairs around the long table. I thought afterwards, what a party we might have. Those people, I later realized, are the various parts of myself. Now, given that this is true of all of us, consider how many things influence us below the level of consciousness, and how many more might be brought up to the conscious level to our mutual profit.
My friend Joseph the Egyptian once told me this:
“Your life is fragmented by many exterior connections, and can only be in balance if you maintain a strong counter-pull, inward. This is the nature of your time and your society. An isolated culture or a very quiet time might need just the opposite form of balancing. In that case the extension outward might need to be encouraged. [In ancient Egypt] we were a different people, in that we were in far more direct connection to what you might call the divine, and therefore were to that degree less aware of ourselves as individuals.”
I take that to mean, all those connections exist; they have their purpose; we are to use them — but the critical thing is for us each to hold our center and be the very individual creature we were created to be.
The nature of space
Did you ever think at all why different times should be different? It isn’t because the planets are in different places or in different relation to each other – that is just the sign aspect of it. (You know, the Bible said God put the planets and stars in the skies to be a sign. What do you suppose that means, if not that their positions and relationships as seen from earth shows something? Or rather, hints at it, more than shows it, because language isn’t involved and couldn’t hold it anyway. But it does point you, if you’d follow where it’s pointing.)
You could do this thought experiment. Imagine all of the space around the earth that the earth has passed through in the past hundred years, and the space it will pass through in the next hundred. That’s a lot of space.
Now, you know that the earth is spiraling through, being dragged along by the sun, and it never goes through the same spot in space twice, any more than you visit the same date in time twice – and for the same reason. But earth goes back to the same relationship to the sun once a year, just as the calendar indicates. So there’s a sort of spiral being traced out in space.
If you look at space as being unmoving, with the solar system moving across it in one direction, you got the earth spiraling around the sun but never hitting the same spot in space twice, because the sun is pulling it. And of course you could think through the same for the sun, if you want, but that is just needless complication.
Thus we have two factors. One is the underlying nature of the space we are actually traveling in at any moment, and the other is the relationship between sun and planets and moons and all.
The relationships between moving bodies isn’t all that hard to figure out, given observation and mathematics, and it has been figured and laid out in tables for a good long time. That’s the basis of astrology. But the quality specific to a particular place in space is another thing.
You know about the precession of the equinoxes and the Age of Aquarius and all. One way of looking at all that is that it is an arbitrary set of rules designed to act as signs. It marks the big spiral in a way we can get in our minds. The constellations and the myths are all tied in together just in ways to help people get symbolically what they can’t get in straight words because of the limitations of language.
We still tend to think that one bit of space is the same as the next bit – and that’s a funny bit of blindness on our part, when you come to think of it, because nobody could think that mid-city Philadelphia, say, is the same as those endless plains of grass and sky between there and Oregon. We know we feel different in different places. A little patch of woods is sacred space in a way no open plain can ever be.
All of this is just to put your mind looking in a certain direction when I tell you that at different times different kinds of information can be passed through easier than the same information at other times or different information at the same time. As Dion Fortune would say, “here is the key to many things.”