A message from the guys upstairs, who apparently are ready to stir the pot in a big way, depending upon how receptive I am.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
8:30 AM. All right, let’s get to the topic. I have been working with two rough schemes that contradict each other, and you said yesterday you would give me a new one more appropriate to where I am now. Is this going to be another of those revolutions that set me farther and farther on a road away from where I’ve been?
Maybe. It depends upon what you decide to do with it. Every road begins at wherever you are, and no road takes you anywhere unless you travel it.
The scheme of “how things are” that is suitable to a person who assumes –
Brief timeout here, to clear this from your mind. Instead of worrying about “he” and “she” and “they” when you describe someone that in the past you would have used the third-person-singular-masculine pronoun for, invent something and stick to that, basically as one more piece of jargon, a word used for a specialized purpose. Since you realize that each individual consists of innumerable strands, some masculine, some feminine, in different ratios depending on the person but also in differing ratios active depending on the situation – we suggest that instead of he, she, or s/he – which still leave you in doubt when it comes to him or her – you use something like ge or ger – meaning group or grouper. But grouper is a fish, and so perhaps ge would be better. Now, you may think this is frivolous or beside the point, but that is because you don’t really understand how your mind works. Think of your mind as a community of automatic messengers, programmed to respond when somebody calls their name, or rather let’s say plays their tune. Every time you use a term that has side-resonances that are not intended but are included in the word’s associations, you accidentally awaken these messengers and “distract yourself.” So, when somebody sends you some message, or you read in some text the use of the feminine rather than masculine pronoun as the default, or alternates them, or does anything that shows they are thinking about that political issue, it distracts you to that extent from what else they are saying. And the more unconsciously the distraction happens, the more powerful and disruptive the distraction. Similarly, if you are reading fiction and a brand name is used, leading you to wonder if the author is being compensated by the product manufacturer, the distraction may be very great, may be little suspected, may in fact cause you to be a slightly different mind that returns to the main point.
I can’t see that inventing a new part of speech is going to lessen the process in anybody!
Maybe not.
Why don’t I just use he and forget about it? The traditionalists won’t notice, those who object to it will write me off as an old fogey, and I can keep my mind on what I’m saying.
Okay with us, but it isn’t what you have been doing. And – what started us on this – your reaction when we started to say third-person-singular was to hesitate, looking for the right word to put in, thus distracting you to that extent from our message.
I see your point. Okay, in your communications we’ll let you talk your way and we will – or anyway, I will – ascribe to you neither sexism nor non-sexism.
We think it will facilitate matters. Political and social arrangements are not our prime concern, as you may have noticed – because they are not yours! But we’ll set that topic aside, too.
As we were saying, anybody who tries to figure out “how things are” must reconcile it with his own assumptions of the nature of what he knows – either that or he must change those assumptions. If he thinks (1) he is an indivisible unit, what he can be told will be different from what is possible if (2) he has realized that every individual (so-called) is a mixture of masculine and feminine psychological elements, à la Carl Jung. If, having absorbed Jung, he is then led on to realize that he is not a unitary mind, at all, but more of a community, (3) again the possibilities are different – and they change again when (if) he realizes (4) that in fact “he” isn’t very much a “he” at all – a unit – but more a ringmaster holding together multiple strands, each independent, each with its own history, each with its own connection extending “back” in time and “outwards” in space to others. If you will go back and number those positions, it will facilitate the discussion.
Done.
The religion, the science, possible to position four is hardly appropriate to any of the others. Surely this is obvious.
Now – this long preliminary accomplished – to our latest permutation.
Without going into the history of your particular conceptions of how things are, we’ll just suggest a current one, and you may object or question, and we’ll try for ever-more clarity.
All right.
You are ring-master. That’s the place to begin, because (theory aside) that is the one place where you – anyone who reads this – experience first-hand what we are saying, even if you don’t realize what you are experiencing.
So. You go through your day. You have stray thoughts, which may be suggested by a myriad of factors, many well understood. The other day, a breeze reminded you of England, and the awareness was just enough that you were able to make it conscious. Had it remained lower-threshold, you might have thought of England and had no idea why. Had it been higher-threshold it might have led you to a whole series of reminiscences, mental, emotional, physical. As it was, it was just high enough to serve.
Now – doesn’t that make you suspicious?
It wouldn’t have. It didn’t, till I overheard (so to speak) what you have in mind. But I see where you’re going.
Yes. What “mechanism” determines whether such perceptions rise, sink or float in your mind? Most would call it chance, we imagine. Some few might say it was all determined in advance, a sort of inevitable change under no one’s control.
And you’re claiming, if I get you right, that this is one subtle way you have of influencing us.
Yes indeed, but we’re saying much more than that.
The people who believe that everything is predestined are correct in one aspect of things: Everything is intimately, intricately, connected. In a sense, there are no accidents (though there are many contingencies that don’t matter whichever way they go. Where a leaf falls on the sidewalk, for instance).
However, we are hereby introducing a form of connection that we think has not occurred to you before. Your non-physical connections are directly, intimately, intricately, inevitably connected to the balance between your thoughts, your habitual concepts, your scarcely-noticed perceptions, your emotions – your whole mental world.
In a sense this is nothing new. It might all be extrapolated from what we’ve said before. But spelling it out may bring it more to the surface, enriching your model.
You are a community of traits, of strands. You’ve gotten that concept. But now consider your everyday life as person-group, and consider how complex and interactive it is. All of that is available to the group-mind of which you are one strand. So, your subliminal perception of a breeze, that brings forth a previously unsuspected physical-memory connection to England, raises some image on your present-moment mind-screen. A memory, or, more, a concept of England as you experienced it, surfaces, and does so either from no apparent cause or from an understood connection with a physical stimulus, or for some other reason. All of this, being a part of your person-group, is also a part of whatever group-mind you participate in, and may influence it unexpectedly or even unsuspectedly.
This works both up and down the chain of being. A strand “within you” (for that is how it appears to you, within) may be influenced by you as its group-mind, and it may have no concept whatever for the source of that influence. It may attribute any intervention to God, or to angels, or demons, or – anything. At your present level of development and attention, explanations suitable for one, two, or three are not satisfying, nor appropriate therefore. At other levels, explanations suitable to level four are inappropriate, because similarly unsatisfying, unhelpful.
The point here is that everything is immensely interconnected, and interact continuously.
The second point is that we can thus tweak your awareness and influence you regardless of conversations such as these. We can assure that that subliminal perception of a cool breeze, reminding your body (so it may be said) of England, receives enough attention to be made conscious, so that we can then use the situation as an example. We didn’t cause the breeze. We didn’t cause the body-awareness, or the mental-emotional connection to England. But we can and do use what is available.
Now you’re more or less out of time and energy, so we’ll continue another time, but we trust that this is a helpful beginning, and starts some speculative rabbits running.
So it does. All right, see you whenever. Thanks as always.
[After the fact: It seems to me it might be worthwhile just to repeat those four possible conceptualizations :
[(1) an indivisible unit
[(2) a mixture of masculine and feminine psychological elements
[(3) not a unitary mind, but more of a community
[(4) not very much a unit, but more a ringmaster]
It is always reassuring to me to read confirmation of something that I have held as a truth without proof. I refer to your paragraph that starts “However we are introducing a form of communication…..” This was the subject of a discussion just last evening with a friend in which I said I wanted these connections to be seamless and natural. Very timely info for me, so thanks.
Hi Frank,
It’s great to see you settled in and posting these communications once again. I knew I missed them, but now I realize just how much, and I appreciate you for sharing them with us.
Bob
I sometimes wonder if this seemingly little remembrances, like the breeze bring up memories of England, do not serve to activate certain threads that were active during the actual experience so that we can receive, or perhaps experience something new from that perspective (with those threads active).