Our minds, like flames

Saturday September 12, 2015
F: 6 a.m. Dr. Jung – if it is Dr. Jung – how can it be a valid connection and yet get things wrong? It worries me.
CGJ: You cannot expect 100% from anything. You know that. So are you then going to disregard your own advice to others and judge the material by your idea of the source rather than on its own merits?
F: Somehow that doesn’t seem decisive, this morning.
CGJ: No. Your confidence is shaken.
F: I am very aware of the limits in my access – I wouldn’t have any confidence if someone asked me for details that you would know but I would not. In fact, I routinely fail such tests.
CGJ: And yet somewhere out of nowhere you produce information that galvanizes people’s attention.
F: Well, it is all a perplexity. I am still concerned not to mislead and not to be misled.
CGJ: Then you must ask yourself, what will satisfy you?

F: An explanation, perhaps, of how it could be that Dr. Carl Jung could miss a piece of an important dream reported to him by a patient, call me, who himself misremembered it.
CGJ: Does not the question answer itself? In the first place, psychiatry does not proceed without many a false step, many an error of observation. But in the second place, you misread the dream, even reading your own 12-year-old record of the dream, and this is what I read.
Do you see? It was a slip of the unconscious, and Freud taught us all that the slip is as important as the content, and has its own importance as a clue to what was going on below the surface to cause it.
So your dream showed a man high up on a wall, and the ladder no longer accessible to him because it had one set of its legs off the ground, which hung it in the air away from him, as well as hanging it in the air in terms of it being useful for anybody.
You read it as his being still on the ladder, thus suspended in midair with the ladder, but this is also true, and the misreading is as interesting as is the original.
The ladder exists. One half of it is still firmly planted. It is not “in the air” in the sense of being entirely ungrounded. However, it is one-half “in the air” which makes it unsafe and should make it impossible to use – and yet today, as opposed to 12 years ago, you see it as stable enough to support a man on it, unmoving. And this is also true.
F: I suppose that as usual I am all the elements in the dream.
CGJ: You are not necessarily the ladder, nor the underground chamber, if you understand me.
F: Not sure I do.
CGJ: Yes you are all the vital elements, but some scenery is needed, which need not represent you. Much depends upon the level of interpretation.
F: I am suddenly feeling like I need to go back to sleep.
CGJ: You can do this any time.
[Later, maybe closer to 2 p.m.]
F: I get more and more worried over the discrepancies. I didn’t misremember the dream, the other person – Jung or my own unconscious, or a trickster – did, and then this morning said I did.
CGJ: Again I must insist, I was following your perception. If I am an invented projection of your own mind – how could I get a perception different from yours? In other words, if it is “you” on either end, how does one not communicate perception to the other?
F: Maybe only through words?
CGJ: You need to define your terms here. Or rather, let us say it would be well for you to consider what you think. Much of your construct is haphazard and internally inconsistent – not in the way life is inconsistent, but in the way things put together piecemeal do not form a coherent whole.
So, perhaps a little theoretical underpinning. This will require an act of faith on your part.
F: Well, let’s see how it goes.
CGJ: Your consciousness – what you are aware of, by definition – varies within limits.
F: The flame analogy that I liked so much.
CGJ: Yes, much like a flame. It has limits and they are definite limits, but they are not inflexible, predictable or
F: Go ahead. Lost it.
CGJ: At the periphery of a flame is air. It cannot exist without air. (I disregard specifics. This is not physics. An underwater torch still must provide a source of oxygen.) It needs fuel, it needs, as well, intangibles such as sufficient heat. If the combustible cannot reach ignition temperature, there can be no flame to generate the heat it needs to sustain itself, though this point may not be obvious.
So, the flame is in no respect independent. It may be experienced as independent, considered to be independent, treated for practical purposes as if it were independent, but in fact it never is and never could be, because the flame is only the visible portion of a larger
F: I want to use the word “matrix” but it doesn’t seem to be just right.
CGJ: Only in its connotations is it a bit too rigid, perhaps. Let us say, simply, the flame’s environment, or perhaps we could say its ecology. No flame exists in and of itself. This cannot happen for the same reason there is no up without down or inside without outside. The flame is the visible portion of a larger being (shall we say) which may or may not be visible, which may be visible sometimes and not others.
Consciousness – an individual consciousness – may be perceived as a flame may be perceived but, like a flame, can never exist in and of itself.
There is a small difficulty here with language. To say that a flame is only part of its surroundings begs the question of where the surroundings may be considered to end. That is, must we consider the whole world as a flame’s surroundings? May we stop when we have taken into account the fuel and oxygen in its immediate vicinity, disregarding for practical purposes the fact that air has no boundaries and fuel came from somewhere? In practice of course we do the latter. But in a very real sense, the larger formulation is true as well.
Consciousness is everything. The 3D world is made of consciousness, and – as the 3D is part of the non-3D – it follows that the non-3D is also made of consciousness. Therefore nothing, no matter what form it takes or how formless it may appear, is anything but a form of consciousness.
[Interruption]
F: So, no permanent barriers between different aspects of consciousness.
CGJ: No, not between humans and plants, or humans and animals, or humans and humans, or humans and machines, or humans and aliens, or humans and the disembodied personified local consciousnesses that may be found.
F: I think between the lines I am getting that in a sense, CG Jung – or Ernest Hemingway or anybody – is more a construct than a reality.
CGJ: No, for one thing that would silently argue that a construct is something different than a reality. But you might look at it this way, and see if it helps make clearer a situation that is easily misunderstood. “CG Jung” is no longer a separate flame in the way he appeared to be, and somewhat was, while he maintained the circle of his physical existence.
F: Stop there. You mean, I think, that we in bodies may be considered as – function as – somewhat separate, even though in truth we are never really separate, and once we drop the body that is no longer true.
CGJ: That is correct. There is a real meaning to death, after all. It is a real change, and not only an inconvenience to be put right by the assumption of a new body in another time and place.
So now, living in non-3D, the “CG Jung” that was, continues in his essence. In fact, we might say he continues as he always was, but not as he appeared in the flesh. He was always part of the great flame; his little flame was never separate except relatively. The circumstances that led to his being considered or perceived as separate no longer exist. He had his time in the flash; he did what he could do or anyway what he did do (for any life has unlived possibilities, by nature), and now that flame that was perceived as separate continues to burn, but it both is and isn’t the same.
F: So when I set out to contact Dr. Jung?
CGJ: Suppose you set out to contact one specific flame in a campfire. That would be like trying to contact one specific cupful of air in the atmosphere. You cannot encircle a thing with no firm boundaries, nor is it necessary.
F: So what do I get (although I have a strong suspicion)?
CGJ: Your suspicion might be called telepathy if you like. Yes, you get whatever part of the flame is in resonance to your own energy of the moment. We should talk about that at greater length, but for now, remember that “you” differ from moment to moment. Just as different moments allow different kinds of thought, so they allow different kinds of emotion
F: I got the feeling I just did it again, got carried away by the logic of parallel construction.
CGJ: Yes, but you caught it. Who “you” are differs moment to moment and so your energetic signature, call it, varies as well. It will be easy for you to see that you “broadcast” differently when you are angry, or anxious, or tranquil, or ecstatic. Similarly you broadcast differently depending upon where you set your attention. An equally tranquil perusal of auto mechanics or psychology will result in a very different broadcast. What we are saying here is that it is not as simple as a matter of mood. Your flame flickers, as flames do, and therefore there is nothing wrong with it, but it helps to realize that this is what it is doing.
F: We are right back to resonance.
CGJ: Not back in the sense of having made no progress. Let’s say we have made another turn on the spiral. Your understanding gains – texture, shall we say – with each new viewpoint.
F: Okay. So to bring it all back home?
CGJ: Your flame is not separate from the flame that was CG Jung’s because at one level all flames in resonance may be considered part of one larger flame. They are and are not separate and distinct. They are differentiated and yet they shade into one another, as a flame may be bright yellow, and blue, and orange, and even white in different places. Same flame, different local color.
You can see, the cause of much misunderstanding is the habit of treating as individual things that are only somewhat individual. From that mistaken viewpoint (mistaken only in thinking itself exclusively rather than only relatively accurate) stems much misunderstanding in general and many perplexities in particular.
F: I can see, as you describe the situation this way, that the picture of the non-3D I have been building up is inappropriately concrete, as if we were still in bodies, almost.
CGJ: You are exploring terrain very different from your 3D home grounds, so you should expect to meet surprises.
F: Well, that’s nine pages and although I didn’t notice when I began, it is 2:45 p.m. now. Maybe I’ll take a stroll instead of a nap. More later?
CGJ: Perhaps. By the way, do not let your schema-making apparatus now fall over to the other side, undervaluing or under-believing-in the continued existence of minds after their 3D creation and sojourn. Just because reality is not entirely one thing does not mean it is not at all that thing.
F: I’ll bear that in mind. Thanks for all this.