TGU on learning and our place in life

Tuesday, September 8, 2015
F: 6 a.m. Open for business, and I will defer to your agenda.
TGU: Then let me talk a little more about spirit.
F: All right. I well remember that we were in the middle of something, either yesterday or Sunday.
TGU: Conceptually, we are engaged in stitching together different patches of understanding.
F: Making a quilt, are we?
TGU: In a way. That’s how ideas are put together into larger concepts, and how glimpses become world-views. It is a process that could continue indefinitely. As you solidify your understanding of one small piece of the puzzle, it becomes a unit, so that
Let’s put it a different way. In order for you to hold larger relationships in mind, each smaller piece
F: Having trouble phrasing things, are we?
TGU: You know what we want, you say it.

F: You gave it to us before – you, or someone. In 3D we have only a limited amount of active memory to play with, even though the mind itself is in non-3D, and so it is important that we put together information in such a way that a little suggests a lot; that way we can in effect handle more things at a time.
TGU: Close enough. And this process is not only a matter of adjustment to temporal limitation. It also allows you to stretch your understanding by extending the edges of your road map.
F: I get that. If I am familiar with the outline of world history in a 200-year period, a casual reference to a given event will mean something to me and will not necessarily have to be spelled out.
TGU: And the ability to reference an event without needing to define it or explain its nature will allow us to use it fluently in ways that we otherwise could not; as a symbol, perhaps, or a concise example of a similarity or contrast. It functions as a sort of shorthand and facilitates the argument being presented.
Similarly, if we explain the nature of the soul as created in 3D and its subsequent graduation into the non-3D, we necessarily confine ourselves to whatever is immediately relevant, and therefore unavoidably present it only in a limited context. However, once it has been presented and understood, all the concepts that went into understanding it are now in effect one unit, and can be then related to other units (concepts, we mean, not other souls) economically and comprehensibly.
F: I understand. What we learned, we learned in isolation, and now we can learn to see it in a context that may or may not modify our understanding.
TGU: Correct. And this is what learning always is. You learn, which modifies what you knew, and then you learn something else, which modifies what you knew, or overthrows it, sometimes. You may choose to rest between periods of learning – may rest entire lifetimes, theoretically – but when you learn, you learn by modifying what you knew.
F: You say “may rest between lifetimes,” and that brings up the subject of continuity.
TGU: Of course, and that is where we are going. Obviously, if each soul is created at birth, continuity does not inhere in
TGU: No, that will only mislead. Give us a moment.
[Pause]
Let’s put it this way, just as one learns in a combination of conceptualization and then redefinition, so the larger being grows or learns by a process of acquiring experience, incorporating it, and acquiring new experience.
F: This sounds perilously like that “earth school” business I am so tired of.
TGU: Bear in mind, anything sincerely held by numbers of people will be found to have some essential truth at its core. Just because many who quote it may understand it only at a relatively superficial level does not mean that their instinct to cling to it is incorrect. After all, the same may be said of any of you, from our point of view. Even an Einstein is pretty simple, seen from a less restricted environment.
The “earth school” analogy isn’t very wrong, for what is life but learning? Where people go wrong, a bit, is in assuming that they know the curriculum, and assuming that God follows the American plan of pedagogy, so to speak.
But from the point of view of the larger being, existing in non-3D but repeatedly (or concurrently) immersing parts of itself in 3D for the sake of acquiring new experience and developing new specialized sub-minds, each 3D life is a modification of what it was, as much as a modification of what it knew. It is the larger being that is the continuity, and the 3D lives that are the increments of learning.
It is not the 3D life that then “continues” as another 3D life, “learning in the Earth school,” as is sometimes thought. It would be closer to say that each 3D life is a thought-experiment of the larger being, and the total of its 3D lives – along with what else the larger being is – is what it becomes.
Of course each larger being will comprise its own set of 3D lives and its own preceding nature, so that a collection of larger beings will be as diverse and as similar as a group of 3D lives themselves would be.
F: And while that was being somewhat tediously and slowly written out (for that is how it appears to me this morning) I got an image of blood cells.
TGU: Of course, because that serves not only as analogy but as a reminder that you must remember “as above, so below.” The whole of life is repetition in scaling, and if you wish to understand what you cannot see, you should look at what you can see, and draw the analogy. So yes, collections of humans are like blood cells in a body of fluid, and, at another level, collections of larger beings are the equivalent of blood cells in a larger being yet. As above, so below – only don’t let your analogies get too calcified. Analogy, we remind you again, is not identity.
F: So rather than us thinking in terms of our particular lives continuing, we should be thinking of them continuing only as part of the larger being.
TGU: Well – that sentence would be unexceptionable, but for the word “only.” What is so “only” about continuing as part of the larger being? You were never anything but part of the larger being. Should your knee – to revert to an earlier example – resign itself to a life “only” as part of a human leg? Should a corpuscle sigh over “only” being part of a blood stream? Should an acorn, a mouse, a mountain, a planet, feel itself devalued because it is a part of the whole rather than the only thing that matters?
This error is the very one you noted in reading Jung yesterday, if you will remember.
F: I do. I couldn’t quote it, but it amounts to the ego trying to function as the self.
TGU: More or less. The ego – the consciousness centering in 3D – is absolutely essential in its sphere, and is totally out of its depth when it attempts to be more than it is. Being the conductor of the symphony that is a human life is responsibility enough; there is nothing demeaning in recognizing that you are not also the composer, the other orchestra members, the audience, and the concert hall itself! You could not function at the scale of a being that could comprehend all that, but, consider: that totality could not exist without the identity of all its pieces, of which you are one. Nor is that all. The concert-hall – to continue the analogy – is but one building among many. Could it function as a railroad station as well? And even if it could,, should it not sigh that it cannot be an entire city? A country? A continent? We are pushing this to the bounds of the absurd deliberately, to ty to bring home to one and all of you that you belong where you belong. You function at your scale, and are there because you are needed. A toenail, a knee, a pancreas, are not interchangeable even if in the end they are built of the same ingredients. Neither are they capable of being what they are not.
And this will serve for the moment.
F: All right, thanks. Pretty fluent, today.
TGU: Fluent or halting, you know the saying from I Ching.
F: Righteous persistence brings reward. Well, we’re righteously persisting, and the journey itself is the reward, I’d say. Next time.