Rita – the three-body problem

Tuesday, March 1, 2016
F: Nearly 5 a.m., Rita. I’m ready if you’re ready.
R: Let’s return to the main line of explication. We’re still looking at how the soul readjusts to its new environment.
Bear in mind, it isn’t “new” in the sense that the soul has been elsewhere. Everyone lives in all dimensions, all the time, as we said earlier. But that doesn’t mean everyone is aware of what they’re living. And here we are beginning to get into new trouble with definitions.
When we say, “you are conscious of this but not of that,” or [pause]
F: Is that me losing the track, or you reconsidering?
R: Well, there’s a difficulty, here. More than one, in fact.
F: And one is my head, stuffed again?

R: That doesn’t help your concentration, but there’s a difficulty on my end, too. It’s one of those situations where if we weren’t constrained by the sequential nature of language and language-processing, we could look at several things differently all at the same time, and it would be like a change of scene in a movie, only you would know that we weren’t changing the subject, only changing the lighting. You see, even the analogy is strained.
F: Well, I don’t know what else to do but what we always do, set it out one thing at a time and then reassemble them. The IKEA method of explanation.
R: Yes, but as you will see, there are limits to such procedures. Think how long it took the guys to change our ideas, because there were so many elements to change, one by one, and then the process of getting us to see them when reassembled was as big a job as each individual piece had been. And even what we accomplished in Rita’s World took six months’ exposition.
F: Rita, it isn’t like you to complain how hard it is, or to throw up your hands and say, “I don’t know if we can do this.” That’s more my role!
R: As you often say, I’m smiling. You know that isn’t what I’m doing.
F: Well, it kind of is, a little, or that’s what it sounds like, anyway.
R: No, I am pointing out a part of the process – not so much for you, because you have been involved in it for so long that you take it for granted, as for our unknown readers who come to the experience primarily as something they are reading. Those who do will already understand, or will come to understand, given enough experience, but until then – as long as all this is only theoretical, it is little more than entertainment. So it is as well to throw in reminders from time to time that it is work.
F: On your end?
R: That isn’t how to look at it, my end or your end. The thing to look at is the effort required to produce an effect. As in physics, for example.
F: I think you’re saying look at the process of transferring understandings – or the basis for understandings, say – in the same way we would look at the process of moving a weighted wagon, say, or lifting a burden. So many ergs of force expended in a given direction within a given time.
R: That’s the idea. Not a complaint but a measurement, or anyway an indication, of the fact that transferring understanding is in its own way a process with its own “physics,” its own inherent rules. Like anything in life, it doesn’t really happen free-form just because the wheels aren’t obvious.
F: I have noticed, along the way, that you tend to intersperse descriptive information with commentary on the process, rather than keeping them separate. A deliberate pedagogical technique, I take it.
R: One of the difficulties with communicating new ideas to minds always enmeshed with the continually-moving present is that of preventing ideas from settling into compartments. Often enough hermetically sealed compartments. So it is better to keep blending in, keep layering.
F: I could feel an analogy to baking hovering there, but couldn’t snag it. Okay, so, given our present difficulty—
R: As so often, the difficulty looks like a difficulty in definitions. What it really is, or is more essentially, is a problem of holding several variable definitions in mind and changing them repeatedly so as to look at them from more than any one side. Outside of the 3D moving-present, it is easy. Working from within sequential perception, not so easy.
One variable is “mind” and another is “dimensions” and, in fact, another is “you.” We need to keep all three changing definitions in mind while we look at them, and do it without letting inertia fix us to any one way of seeing it.
Mind may mean the 3D portion, or the non-3D portion, or both together, or the All-D for that individual person, or the mind of the larger being as well. (Or more, but that will do for the present.)
Dimensions may mean 3D in the way you experience it, and them – or it may mean merely a definition-of-convenience, because it isn’t like such definitions are ever ultimate; they are convenient ways to see things to make sense of things. They have no objective existence.
F: That isn’t quite what you mean. You mean the objective existence of whatever it is we experience as dimensions is not tied to our way of experiencing it as dimensions.
R: That’s right. And “you” may mean the 3D being in any of several senses, and may mean the 3D and non-3D component, together, considered in relation to the larger being. (And, again, we could go farther with this, but there is no point to it now.)
You are aware of the three-body problem in celestial mechanics.
F: Vaguely. For some reason it is impossible to calculate exactly the interactions of three bodies upon one another. That’s my understanding of it, anyway. They can approximate, somehow, but they can’t get it precisely, not because they can’t measure accurately but because of some difficulty inherent in having three simultaneous variables in play. At least, that’s my understanding of it.
R: And it is your understanding, accurate or not makes no difference, that will guide the analogy. We are in a similar difficulty as physicists with their three-body problem as you have described it. We are needing to deal with more variables than language or even mental habits are intended to process simultaneously. We will fudge it by dealing with one at a time and will then attempt to approximate what things look like with all three changed, but we cannot well show them changing. You see the difficulty?
F: Oh yes, and we have run into it before. Our minds want to establish a static photograph rather than a movie.
R: It is worse than that, for a movie is only a sequence of static photographs. This is more like a flowing picture that doesn’t move frame by frame, but continually dissolves and reforms.
F: A kaleidoscope, as we’ve said before.
R: Perhaps an electronically _____ kaleidoscope.
F: I couldn’t think what else to do but leave a blank, until the word appeared. “Powered” doesn’t seem quite right.
R: Let’s say a kaleidoscope more electronic in nature than mechanical, more fluid than a tumbling of solid materials.
F: Okay, that works.
R: So let us go all the way back to the beginning of today’s entry, as you have been doing repeatedly this whole time. What we are after is to describe changes in the ex-3D soul’s awareness, but as its own self-definition changes, our description has to become more careful, even more plodding, because it is ever easier to move definitions silently and unintentionally, thus confusing ourselves. People who describe these changes while seeing the ex-3D soul only as an individual avoid some of these difficulties, but only at the cost of some distortion.
F: You’ve got me looking at the clock and counting pages, going, “Can I get out of this yet?” It’s something of a strain.
R: Well, it is. But it’s good work. The very sitting-with-unaccustomed-ways-of-seeing-things is worthwhile, and is a good habit to acquire or deepen. But it is work.
Very well, let’s leave with this, and start here next time, hopefully remembering, at that time, the very limitations I have been at some pains to sketch here. It will do no good if when I resume sketching relationships and changes, you allow yourselves (for this is aimed at everybody, not particularly any one person) to slide back into comfortable mental habits. We are describing continually changing relationships and perceptions and self-definitions, and, therefore, experiences. Fixed in any one position, they are to that extent falsified. So, be aware of that potential pitfall. This is something I cannot help you with beyond warning you. You must make the effort, and must keep coming back to it and renewing your effort every time you realize that you have fallen off. This takes work, the way it takes work to be aware of your dreams and relate them to the rest of your life. And that is a hint as to coming attractions.
F: All right, Rita. You are ramping things up a little.
R: Not so much me as the intrinsic nature of the endeavor. At some point people have to decide if they are willing to work for new levels of being or are content to play with ideas. Despite how that sentence sounds, either choice is fine – everything in its proper time, person by person – but the two attitudes do lead in very different directions.
F: Understood. See you next time then, and our thanks for all this as always.