Conversations August 30, 2010

Monday, August 30, 2010

5:15 AM. I have just spent half an hour or so reviewing the material given since August 19, and I am a bit staggered by the amount of new information, new ways of seeing things, that you have provided, so smoothly and quietly, in that time. And equally impressive is how, once I absorbed it, it’s now so obvious-seeming.

In that, you see the benefits of sending this out in real time — day by day — and getting feedback from this or that person as you go along. The interchange, the suggested ideas, even the misunderstandings, are all productive.

Are they not!

So, last night you were given two. Do you remember both?

With your assistance, I imagine I will. One is that the various strands that comprise our person-groups are not units themselves (as you said earlier) and therefore are not within themselves at any uniform level of development. Another is, neither are we.

Yes, and of course both points are obvious as soon as you remember that as it is above, so it is below. You experience yourselves as comprising elements some of which lead you “upward” and others of which lead you “downward” — that is, toward or away from whatever value we may be considering at any given moment. Some are “good” habits, some are “bad” habits. Hemingway was a careful and meticulous craftsman, clearly a good trait — except he was at the same time an exacting and intolerant man in his judgment of others, say. You see — because of how we just set it up — that these are merely exterior judgments of the same sort of trait expressed in different contexts. Painstaking craftsmanship is, in a curious way, a form of intolerance, only seen differently.

Now, hold that thought and consider that what you are used to calling traits are in fact person-groups in themselves, and you can see perhaps that the same trait is going to express differently in different contexts according to how different strands within it are evoked by what it can only see as external circumstances. Thus, the person-group responsible for craftsmanship may be the same person-group responsible for any other irrationally obsessive behavior. (“Irrationally” meaning, here, not the result of consciousness or decision but functioning more or less autonomously.)

Again, as above, so below. Take your own lives (because experienced from the inside) or take Hemingway’s life (because partly expressed in his writing, and partly recounted in biographies, and partly explored herein along with him in a sort of inside-but-outside view). Try applying these concepts so that you can work out how they function in real life, and so that your own access to higher levels of your person-group may provide you with insight as you focus.

Wow, I got a real glimpse of many things as we wrote that! I hope you’re making notes as we go!

The more you work the material, the more you will thereby unpack what is contained within it. You just got a glimpse, or perhaps we should call it an intuitive knowing — same thing, really — of how you function upward, in analogy to how your lesser levels function in relation to you.

And I almost see how a thing can be smaller than us and larger than us at the same time.

If the spatial analogy did not so consistently obtrude, the misunderstanding would not exist. Try to explain; we will correct as needed, but the effort of explaining renders material of any sort more accessible to you; it makes it yours by tying it in.

It is (I think) the threads analogy that just gave it to me. And as I start to write this I see again that the old strings-and-rings analogy is being changed on me as I go along, or perhaps I never understood it in a way it was also meant. I thought of it as expressing the interconnecting of various individuals by shared traits, but that was before I realized that at all “levels” we are not units but — squads, say. That isn’t wrong, but it isn’t enough. I don’t know that I know quite how to clarify (even to myself, not merely to others) this new context.

Instead of thinking of a strand as a strand, a thread as a thread, if you could perhaps (though misleadingly ultimately, but for the moment) think of each as a fiber optic cable, you could more easily see that it isn’t a connector but a sort of generalization about a connecting pathway. But then forget about fiber optics quickly, lest you find it too satisfying an analogy, because the “unit” would sneak right back in to your concepts — your brains are heavily biased to analogize with sensory experience, remember, and units are what the brain knows except “abstractly.”

A moment to recalibrate. All right.

Again — forgetting the fiber-optic cable analogy (we almost regret suggesting it. We almost incline toward asking you to suppress it, and might if not for the gap it would cause. It is very seductive, we see, but it cuts against a real understanding of the way things are, because the cable itself becomes that migrating individual that distorts so much thought on the subject.)

Forgetting cables, look at things this way. Your various person-groups that are held together by the temporary container you call yourself. That is, the person-groups that together comprise the person-group you experience yourself to be, and the person-group that you experience yourself to be part of.

Three “levels” there — and the reason we abandoned sentence structure is that it gets too complicated sometimes to associate images in the logical manner sentences require. Grasp the image and criticize grammar some other time.

A person-group to which you are a thread.

A person-group that you are coordinating.

A person-group that together is but one thread of you.

Three “levels.” Which is “real,” or “complete” or more integral? Which is the “correct” viewpoint from which to judge other levels?

Clearly, wherever you are situated.

Of course, because you never have a choice in the matter. Everything is relative to everything else, so why bother to look elsewhere for a better place from which to judge? The only reason to envision changing viewpoint places is to provide binocular rather than monocular vision. But it remains true that “man is the measure of all things.” This is true at the level of person-group “above” or “below” you as well — or didn’t you ever stop to think that any consciousness is as real to it as yours is to you?

Well, when I do healing work through communication with the body part, or with the internal personality considered as robot, I talk to it just as to any other person.

Yes — often somewhat to their surprise, though you haven’t realized it. To them the sudden transparency of the veil between your level and theirs is as startling as yours, initially, when talking to us across the veil that you took to be between physical and non-physical.

Hadn’t made that connection. Of course, if mind is non-physical, that wasn’t the veil involved, was it?

Proceed a little farther now. You have realized that “your” guys are not the best source of technical information, for instance. You have realized that we don’t know everything, and don’t have immediate access to anything and everything even if it is something we can find. You have seen that we have preferences, and easier or harder lines of approach.

I do see it. You — my higher-level person-group, are relating to me as to one strand of your person-group.

Yes, and our focusing upon you lights up your consciousness — expends your awareness — adds possibilities of greater choice — hooks you in to a greater meaning. Your experience of our person-group’s attention liberated potential in you.

And it reacts upon you as well.

Certainly. If we can clear our robots’ bad habits and misunderstandings, we can make our own progress.

This begins to clear up so many things. Jon’s person-group is not as harmonious (maybe not as conscious?) and so, just as he has told me, to my initial skepticism, he has a harder time because he has a harder task at the other end, not exactly because his attitude or something is not focused right at his end.

Yes. And so his job as a member of that person-group is to be as helpful a robot as possible, which in turn will smooth his life.

Hear us well, there. Being a helpful robot does not mean doing your chores with a cheerful attitude. It means, intending well. Working toward harmony. Seeking growth in understanding, and exercising patience and loving forbearance toward them even as they make your life hard.

Another time — for you are running out of time this morning — we may talk of the virtues as known to spiritual and philosophical traditions, and suggest why they rather than other attitudes are considered virtues. Not because they are considered “nice,” and not because they render you tractable to social control. The real reason is that these attitudes smooth your life and contribute to the development of those on both ends of the line of development that you exist on. In other words, you may help shape or reshape (or, we might say, might alter the balance of forces within) person-groups to which you belong and at the same time because in the same process person-groups that seem to be part of you. The guys upstairs on the one hand, your robots on the other hand. You see (or half-see, or sense) how these are two names for the same thing seen in different contexts? And you in human life are a third name for the same thing? Perhaps not yet — but bookmark the concept.

And, I take it, the Seven Deadly Sins that I memorized by finding an acronym for them are seven ways that lead in the wrong direction.

Well, list them and you judge. Do these seem like traits that lead you to greater understanding, greater harmony, greater integration?

The seven deadly sins in the order of my acronym of LEG CAPS are not in the order of severity that my Catholic theology had them. I don’t know what that order is, though I do know that pride is the first deadly sin. And perhaps here we might think of “sin” in its meaning as “missing the mark.”

Lust

Envy

Gluttony

Covetousness

Anger

Pride

Sloth (or anomie, a sort of generalized  hopelessness)

Can you see how different and helpful these look when considered as obstacles to a conceptually clear goal, rather than as things to be ashamed of, or to be punished for?

Yes. Purpose makes all the difference. And your long exposition of another way to see our nature is bringing our obvious purpose to the fore.

Well, one purpose, anyway. All right, enough for now, shortly.

Yes, though I am actually more energized now than when we started. The only sad thing is that it is about 10 after six and still dark out.

All things have their season — including the seasons!

All right, till next time. Thanks.