Saturday, September 4, 2010
4:45 AM. You were going to conclude your list of the way our lives change by discussing how we express various aspects of ourselves.
And, as you knew immediately, this was a major topic far too important and too involved to be dealt with as an afterthought or even dealt with on the same basis as the others. Nor is our list necessarily complete; thought would suggest other ways in which lives in the three-dimensional world change. But it is complete enough for our purposes.
Now, in talking about change in various aspects of a given group, we come to the center of our explanation/argument. For, you will remember, we said that various “levels” of reality each changed within the level, and both did and did not affect other levels, an impossible paradox, surely. And we said that “levels” like “individuals” is a convenient fiction. And above all, we said, as above, so below, which says, investigate your own level closely enough and you can come to understand the repetitive pattern that constitutes the reality in which we live and will always live.
A strand-mind, a person-mind, a group-mind — seen from any given point of view. There is always something more and less complicated than you, something larger and smaller, and they always are of the same substance and nature. There is no other.
Now, bear in mind, our statements that may be taken as absolutes about the nature of things are to be taken as — shall we say — rough estimates, as ready-reference guides, or rules of thumb. We do not have the purpose of spelling out All That Is in any absolute sense, nor do you have the background or the inclination. Our task is to render more comprehensible the life you lead, now in the body, then outside the body — which means, temporarily in the physical, then in the non-physical. Science and metaphysics will eventually come up with a joint understanding far more sophisticated and powerful, but that time is not yet, nor could you and your contemporaries do any more with it than with what we are providing. In other words, it is enough, what we’re giving you. If you use it, it will guide you to greater life. Anything beyond the immediately useful may almost be regarded as a mere intellectual amusement. Not harmful, not trivial, but not essential in an emergency.
Is this an emergency?
It is, shall we say, a special period, a la Castro’s Cuba when its supply of petroleum disappeared. An emergency in the sense of the end of the former business as usual, but not necessarily fireworks, gunplay and destruction. The end of the old and the interface with the new, however it plays out.
Now — and this may proceed slowly, Frank, so be willing to plod, and don’t count pages per hour as you are inclined to do. Slow and steady.
All right.
As you re-examine your lives, you reading this, in the light of what we have sketched out for you, you will more clearly see that your expressed life is the result of the interplay of various strands within your person-group. Once absorbing that fact, you will more easily understand that same process as it plays out at other levels, the strand-minds that you initially called robots and the group-mind that you have been calling The Guys Upstairs.
Nothing in the universe — in the reality, we are tempted to say, to avoid any possible confusion with astronomical terms — is static and unchanging. Everything changes. In a sense, then, the overall pattern of continual change does not change. This is not a mere paradox, and it is certainly not meant as intellectual pyrotechnics or somersaults. A pattern of continuous change cannot change although (or even because) the constituent forces that are changing, themselves change patterns.
The reality is a continuously changing light-show, or kaleidoscope — provide your own analogy. And — as above, so below. Nothing is static. Even an appearance of non-movement will change.
So, examine your life. If you did so during our listing of the kinds of changes possible, you should have been able to identify at least one example of each in your life. So now let’s look a little more closely. Where the net effect is fluctuation, what has caused this effect? And the same for progress, growth, discarding or pruning, regress (losing ground) and incorporation. Each of these effects is produced by the mechanism of your expressing aspects of yourself. So, you see, that is why the mention of expressing aspects of your person-group seemed a major new topic. It marks a transition from effect to the mechanism that produces the effect.
By the way, if it has not occurred to you, you could clean up the concepts named above — make them symmetrical — by pairing them:
progress and regress
growth and pruning
incorporation and rejection
We didn’t mention rejection separately but it is implicit. Notice how — the structure of the physical brain being what it is — there is something more satisfying in pairs along dualities than separate itemizations without coordination of concept.
All these forces amount to shaping, by various levels of the total being but ultimately (that is, finally a matter of) your choices.
You getting sidetracked, a little?
Maybe a little, but it’s still worth saying. Very well, the main track for the session remains: You, in the body, have the ability and the right and the responsibility to do what only may be done within the limitations of the physical; you pick and choose what you want to live, what you want to be. In so doing, you affect your various strand-minds as they affect you. You have your effect on the group-mind as it does on you. And yet from another viewpoint — well, let’s pursue first the aspect of things in which you do — we do — affect each other level.
Think back to Hemingway as an example not specific to any of you but accessible to any of you. (Of course in the larger sense nearly anyone is available to any of you — dependent mainly on natural affinity, but here we confine ourselves to the external record). You have on your own record the inner Hemingway, long past pretense or defensiveness, judging his life, showing how it appeared to him. Yet you have seen how even after leaving the confines of the body, he didn’t necessarily automatically understand everything that had happened. It’s a matter of concentrating on it.
Well, there was the creative writer, the craftsman (not quite the same skill sets, therefore by implication you should see, not quite the same set of strands), the borracho, the competitor, the avid learner, the skillful teacher, the sensory man, the intuitive man, the good friend and the vindictive enemy, the tower of strength and the example of weaknesses, the magnanimous and gracious man, the suspicious and mean one, etc. etc. A biographer is kept at full stretch, trying to fit this complete man into a pattern, or trying to account for so bewildering a mosaic of “moods” or “sides to his personality.” The superficial observer often enough collects certain expressed traits, decides that these are the “real” ones, and disregards or denies that others are as important or as central or even as genuine as the ones he has chosen. In so vast and towering a complete man as Hemingway this is necessary unless and until one has the key — which is why, he cooperating, we are using him as model.
As you re-envision Hemingway not as a unit but as a person-group holding together such a vast array of traits, think of him as being somewhat under the spell of one or another strand-mind depending upon the circumstances, and then, ultimately, imposing his person-mind will upon them to bring them into temporary cohesion. The shape of that cohesion will alter according to circumstance, just as the expression in his life will alter depending on the balance of power among the various strand-minds when the person-mind is not in charge, is not enforcing its will and its view of things.
And, remember, you are doing this not out of an obsessive interest in a man nearly 50 years dead, but out of an interest in yourself. For we are using a model, here.
Getting tired. Can we wrap up for today soon?
Yes. In fact this is as good a place as any. Every person-group interacts with its higher and lower levels. Sometimes the group-mind — the guys upstairs — drive, and sometimes they are driven, little though you might recognize your influence. Sometimes the strand-minds — robots, or habits, or traits, or moods, depending on how it strikes you — sometimes the strand-minds drive and sometimes you do. In all cases it is a question of how conscious you as a person-mind are, and how inclusive, and how receptive, and how purposive. We’ll have lots more to say about all this — or rather, you will, once we spell out the general principles.
Thank you. It’s about six, time to close up shop — and the sun has not yet risen; I’m still in the dark. But then, that might be said in so many contexts!