Thursday February 5, 2015
F: 4:30 a.m. Good morning, Miss Rita. So – good and evil, continued.
R: Yes. Helpful to have the question poised for you, isn’t it?
F: It is indeed. There’s all the difference in the world. It makes me aware of how hard it can be, to try to do both ends of the process.
R: I again encourage all who read this to bear in mind the environment it is describing. One world, a shared reality, a difference in environments, but still a shared duality, experienced differently by different parts of our being. If you can remember this while we talk about the problem of good and evil (and other topics to follow) you will find your comprehension of many things gradually changing, integrating. But if you only read these words without making the effort to experience them from a new place, what effect can they have?
F: New wine in old wineskins.
R: You need an analogy suited to the times. People in the time of Jesus would have understood that analogy, so that is how he put it. He would have used a contemporary analogy today as he did then.
F: New software running on a previous operating system? Something like that?
R: Well, think about it. Notice that even trying to find a modern equivalent served to make the reality of the thing being analogized more real to you. In any case, the point remains: to absorb new mind-sets, new orientation is required – and, at the same time, new orientation facilitates absorbing new material.
F: Once more, to understand A, etc.
R: Yes. That’s the sense of it.
Very well, I said we would resume with some words on good and evil as it is experienced outside of 3D. The one crucial difference in the experience of the same reality is that of time experiences as a whole rather than in slices.
You can see that if you experience anything in time-slices, it is going to vary moment by moment, and whatever aspect it presents at any given moment will appear dominant. Like your experience of your lives in general, it will be always out of proportion. The present moment always far outweighs all others, in terms of its intensity and its – effective importance, call it. Your lives are never experienced in proportion until you see them from a place from which all moments have equal weight. Again, this is by design, to enable and enforce the process of successive change. Still, it is necessary to bear in mind that your judgments are necessarily biased by the disproportionate importance of any given moment.
This is what I was referring to when, at the end of our last session, I said that duality can be experienced as orientation rather than as a trap. It is all in the ability – or inability – to remember other moments while experiencing any one moment.
Thus, pain. We once asked the guys about pain and they said they know it hurts, but it is so useful. You and I, Frank, knew enough to know that this was not callousness on their part, just as they had also said that we would find them somewhat chilly, emotionally, if we could experience them in their own element. Now I know the meaning behind the statements, and I’ll try to make it clearer than it was to us then.
You will bear in mind that we have moved beyond that perception of a thing as evil merely because it upholds values that may be considered a matter of taste. We are attempting now to look at pure evil, pure good, as best we can discuss them.
The first thing to be said is – from what starting point?
F: I can feel what you mean. I can feel where you want to go with it, but I don’t have the words for it.
R: Merely stay with the feeling and the thought will clarify as I say more. That’s all that ever happens, it’s merely taking long enough here for you to experience the gap.
Good and evil may be considered to be on a long line, with every possible gradation between them. If there were only one line, it would be simple. It would also be static, and would offer little or no potential for choice and movement. It is in the cross-currents created by the coexistence of different combinations of positions that the possibilities of choice and growth and movement – and of retrogression, of course – become possible.
F: It is hard to get words around this.
R: You only experience the difficulty when you try to strategize ahead, so to speak – to structure it before it comes out. Don’t fight the process, and all will be well.
F: That is, I will experience that it is well.
R: Exactly. To continue. Every line of choice may be considered a different scale.
F: That’s awkward. It isn’t going to be understood.
R: Rephrase it if you can.
F: I know. Take it by the seven deadly sins, say.
R: That’s acceptable. Go ahead.
F: I take it that you are saying that anyone may be at a different position between good and evil along many different scales and the result is different for each, because of the productive complications of a more complicated system of measurement. Or, not more complicated system, more comprehensive.
R: Yes, close enough.
So we may measure ourselves according to different scales and for instance one such set of scales are the seven deadly sins as described by the church over the years. I made an acronym to help me remember them: LEG CAPS. Lust, envy, gluttony, covetousness, anger, pride, sloth. That isn’t the order of importance traditionally given to them, but it was the only acronym I could devise. (And I can imagine our readers now sitting down and industriously looking for a better acronym. I smile to think of it. Put “P” first, guys; pride is supposed to be the first deadly sin.)
R: That serves to illustrate the point. Not the question of sin – that is for another time, perhaps – but the question of measurement of different qualities of good and evil. You see? Not, how does anyone rate, how is anyone doing, in overcoming temptations, but, what different ways can good and evil be experienced.
F: But I can feel people’s hackles rise as soon as you even mention the word sin. There’s too much resistance to it.
R: Well, it was your example! I’m smiling. Let’s look at it from another direction, then, tying it to behavior. Cruelty would be one. Call the scale compassion-to-indifference. Or, a slightly different way of looking at it, identification-to-rejection. You can see that any one person – at any one time – is going to fit somewhere on that scale. They are very compassionate, very aware that “all men are brothers” and they are constitutionally unable to deliberately hurt anyone else, for just that reason. Or they are very aware that the world is divided between themselves (and anyone else they identify with) and the rest of the world, and they see no objection to doing as they wish, taking what they want or, indeed, may strongly value the sense of self-assertion they experience in subjugating others to their will. That is, this is a scale that ranges from compassion to indifference, or from identification to rejection of identity, or from kindness to cruelty.
In a life in 3D time-slices you are going to experience any given position one at a time, and it is going to be correspondingly exaggerated in your consciousness, as any moment is exaggerated in importance.
We – yourselves outside 3D – do not experience it that way. We experience good and evil, as every other duality, more as a ratio than as a once-and-for-all choice, or a situation.
And, bear in mind, any one measurement – cruelty, say – is only one measurement. Regardless where a person may be on one scale, you cannot reliably predict where that same person is going to be on another scale. What does a person’s cruelty or compassion tell you about his or her
F: Did you get at a loss for a concept to fill in, or did I lose the beam?
R: A little of both, because to continue that thought in this context would be to mislead, but you were strongly expecting a continuation, so could not feel anything but interruption.
F: I keep learning about the process as we go along
R: Should that surprise you? A teaching is going to have many strands to it, some implicit.
Let us leave that thought unfinished for the moment, and leave it that the question of good and evil has many axes, hence many positions for people to occupy simultaneously. Hence, you are unlikely to meet a person in body who is pure good or pure evil – and if you don’t find one in body, you needn’t expect to find one outside the body. Compound beings cannot be expected to be all one thing, regardless of what “thing” is in question. And we in the higher dimensions who have been shaped by 3D experience are, inevitably, ourselves different mixtures of good and evil.
F: It has been said – I forget who said it – that the line between good and evil does not run between us, but through us.
R: That’s right. And so people who like to divide others into good or evil are merely truncating their own self-perception.
Your hour is over, and we will have to continue at another time.
F: Feels like we are inching along.
R: Slow and steady wins the race.
F: That sounds like a handicapping formula that would be disastrous.
R: It depends on the length of the race, and the relative stamina of the racers. Until next time.
F: Next time, then.