Sunday, June 26, 2016
F: 6:10 a.m. All right, young man (I’m in Tommy Lee Jones mode this morning after watching “Space Cowboys” last night), let’s begin.
TGU: Let’s talk about conflicts as humans experience them.
F: Fine with me. I take it you mean internal conflicts rather than external.
TGU: What makes you think they are different in substance>? They are mostly different expressions.
F: I do believe you’re going to have to explain that.
TGU: Well, it isn’t so difficult to understand, if you will but remember that there is no external and internal except provisionally, and in 3D only. Most of your troubles with each other stem from your forgetting or your not knowing in the first place that in a real sense, not a playing-with-words sense, there is no “external.” The 3D world slows down the feedback, separates it out, gives you time enough between stimulus and response to decide, so that you may choose rather than only reflect what you are.
F: Reflect it in what we do, you mean.
TGU: In case our point isn’t clear, it is the difference (to put it into 3D terms) between chosen reaction and instant reflex. Outside of 3D, how can we choose, when what we are is instantly reflected in our reaction?
It isn’t quite that simple, of course, but nearly. We sent ourselves into 3D, you might say, specifically so that we could gain time. That is a multi-layered play on words, so give it some consideration. The 3D gives us time to consider; it gives us time, so that we may choose to override, or not override, whatever reaction would otherwise have come automatically.
F: I think I get at least part of your meaning.
TGU: There is no need to get every layer at any one moment. No prizes for early completion of the course. The prize is for staying the course, no matter how long it takes.
F: It turns the free-will argument on its head, doesn’t it? Some philosophers have proven to their own satisfaction that we cannot have free will, because we are at each moment the product of what each past moment has made us. But this says it is just in order to produce a delay, a moment of freedom to choose, that time was devised.
TGU: Bear in mind, the argument about predetermined response would be correct – is correct – so long as the non-3D mind is left out of consideration. You don’t see rocks deciding whether to fall this way or that; they follow their predestined route. Yet water in a waterfall, say, has a little more mobility, hence a greater consciousness (not the way to put it, but let’s keep moving), hence you see falling water, like rising smoke, behaving in ways presently being studied by chaos theoreticians. Falling water, rising smoke, will follow certain laws; it will not be completely predictable within those laws, for the laws themselves allow for what in humans you would call choice.
F: And plants more so, and animals more yet, and us more than any, or more anyway than anything else in 3D?
TGU: Yes but no. We return to the parenthesis I had thought to pass in silence. It is not a matter of degree of consciousness but of kind. A rock has as much consciousness as a waterfall or a fox or a scribbler. But how consciousness expresses depends upon the nature of the vessel it is expressing in.
F: The greater the mobility, the more that being needs to take care of its external life, you – or somebody – told us 15 years ago, and that affects how much attention we could pay internally.
TGU: Not exactly but close enough for our purposes. We related internal and external freedom, inversely, but our point then was that everything has consciousness, whether humans can perceive it or not. Our point here is that consciousness is not doled out in different measure, but expresses in different ways, producing different worlds to live in, hence different experiences. Nothing is background for somebody else’s play, no matter how it looks.
F: Or, maybe, nothing is only background for someone else’s play?
TGU: In appearances, you are correct. But to speak more deeply, that is only appearance. Really there is no external. There is no “objective.” Not really. However, these appearances are useful side-effects of the very useful 3D-theater, as you used to call it, so there is no escaping them. Just don’t mistake them for reality.
To make a wider point: Pretty nearly everything you know, that science knows, that religion knows, that experience tells you, that logic dictates, that deduction tells you, that your senses report – it’s all incomplete unless you factor in the continuous but often disregarded or unsuspected presence of the non-3D. You can’t see the detail straight if you are always having to fit it into a general scheme that is not merely incomplete but is systemically flawed.
Any unanswered arguments
F: You mean undecided, I think.
TGU: Well let’s say any argument that goes on and on because there are strong arguments on either side of the question, but only
F: No, no.
TGU: Well, you try it.
F: I hear you saying, some arguments never conclude because they include contradictory data – or data that leads to contradictory conclusions, say – and some will be persuaded by one set and others by the other, and in each case, one can build a logically unassailable case. Therefore there is no agreement. Reincarnation versus one-life, as one example. Free will versus predestination, as another.
TGU: That’s a good phrasing of it. In such cases, the contradiction can only be resolved at a higher level, not be disregarding or refuting the opposite argument. Paradox does not exist, but tangled self-contradictory situations do. In such case, if you cannot bring in the existence of non-3D influences, you cannot see the resolution of the conflict. Or to put it another way, you cannot see the bounds of a polarity; you cannot see why two incompatibles are actually expressions relative to each other within a polarity, rather than either-true-or-false choices.
F: That’s very helpful. Looking back, I thought we were going to discuss conflict.
TGU: Aren’t we? Haven’t we been? You in 3D are living contradictions within the 3D experience. You live in 3D conditions that allow you to experience reaction in slow motion, so to speak. Yet you also live in non-3D which, you might say, knows better.
F: Knows better and attempts not to interfere, lest it lose the benefit of the experience, yet interferes occasionally if we get too far off-base.
TGU: If you need the course-correction, yes. Now perhaps you (your readers, we mean; we recognize that this is not a problem for you personally, Frank) can see that there is no question of “others” interfering with your lives, or making you puppets. There is no question of your freedom being limited by “others” when you experience the occasional course-correction. You are the conflict. It is in the nature of the non-3D person having a 3D experience, one could say.
F: You usually have a specific point you want us to get. Is that it?
TGU: It will be worth while at some point to describe some of the ways your lives experience conflict between your 3D aspects and your non-3D aspects.
F: I think I begin to see it. You are showing us that we are conflicting things in that we aren’t only 3D creatures – and you are leading to the fact that our non-3D components have their own priorities not so much as individuals in their own right but as parts of a greater whole, in turn.
TGU: Isn’t that what we have been saying?
F: Different things look different still, in different contexts.
TGU: You wouldn’t let us get by with a sentence like that!
F: Smiling. No, probably not. I mean, if you’ve said it before, we may have taken it differently because of the context of whatever discussion it was embedded in.
TGU: Now bear in mind, life is not simple. You are not simple. We can only examine one aspect of life, of your existence, one by one, or one combination at a time. The unstated interaction of all systems all the time is going to be more complicated than life will look as we are dissecting this or that element of it, ignoring others.
F: Sure, I see that, and I don’t see that we have any alternative. How could anybody analyze a waterfall? Although, oddly enough, that is what I have always longed to do. Watching a waterfall, or a rapids, or the wake of a ship, I have always felt a certain frustration that I can’t understand it as well as aesthetically appreciate it. Has that been my non-3D bleeding through, all these years?
TGU: We will take that as a rhetorical question. And your hour is up.
F: Thanks very much for this. I almost decided to take a day off, but I’m glad I didn’t. Till next time, then.