Rita on my reaction to explorer tape 31

Wednesday, August 9, 2017

4:45 a.m. Rita, so interesting to listen to the Explorer tape 31 excerpt on the TMI website and hear a younger you than I ever knew – younger than I am now, too. And the information itself was fascinating. I remember your telling me how you and Martin would record a session that you regarded as being of exceptional interest, and would play it back at New Land community meetings at your house on a Sunday, only to find that somehow it had become boring rather than exciting. And I remember you and I discussing that – in one of our sessions like this, in these past couple of years after you had dropped the body – and coming to the conclusion that when one listens to something while it is happening, one is part of the temporary group mind and so participates, but if one only listens later, it is as if overhearing, and so it may go dead. I found that it required effort to actually listen, to only listen rather than half listen and half do other things, and that if I did not make that effort, I got nothing much, and if I did make it, I participated. Worth remembering. But let’s discuss that content, and whatever it may lead to.

Notice that you were tempted to be discouraged.

Oh yes!

You pride yourself on not requiring a definite structure of knowledge, and not requiring that what you learn lead to anything concrete and definite and certainly not authoritative in any final sense of the word, yet even you were dismayed to realize that any structure of truth is only one way to see things, and – most importantly – that there is no ultimate structure of truth to be found.

Well, I always assumed that there is an ultimate truth, even if we would never be able to do better than to approximate it. The tape seemed to say that truth changes, or let’s say has no structure except that which we give it.

But that isn’t the source of your temptation to discouragement, though you don’t quite realize it. The source is the suspicion that the effort is a waste of time.

Doesn’t that follow?

It may seem to, but no. Lifting barbells seen it itself would be well described as a waste of time, but when you remember that lifting the barbells is an effort undergone for the sake of producing a result, the effort is once again linked to purpose. So, writing in a journal is not sensible if you look at it as a matter of putting ink onto paper. It is the meaning of the words, and the reason for the recording of the words, that makes pushing the pen meaningful.

So the attempt to make sense of life is its own reward.

Well – isn’t it? But there’s more to the subject, and since it has arisen, this is a good time to approach it. The fact that – well –

I’ll do it. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle said we can never really get to the reality of things because we can never measure both speed and position beyond a certain level of accuracy. Beyond that point, observation itself introduces changes. (I realize that probably this isn’t quite what he said, but I think that’s what he meant: no certainty because inherent in the nature of things, susceptibility to change caused by observation.) And you are saying that is as true of psychic observation as of physical observation.

My observations are a little different from that conclusion. It is a nuance, but an important one. I would say that the psychic equivalent of the uncertainty principle doesn’t have to do with the effects of observation except in this regard: The closer you look, the more you see that no scheme of things you can derive can ever adequately explain the All-D, because any such scheme is a part of it, in two sense of the word: “part of it” meaning belonging to it, and “part of it” meaning only one piece of a larger whole. But the effort put into understanding has its own two-fold reward. It enriches the one making the effort (and does, indeed, bring that person closer to a more profound and useful understanding) and it enriches the world, the All-D. And that deserves a word or two.

Yes, I should say so.

If you think about how minds in 3D environments result in more complex minds being added to the total, isn’t the application obvious?

The more we think on such things, the more the All-D has to work with?

Well, I suppose that is true in a way, but what I was referring to is

Is? I lost the thread.

Let’s say, time spent in such exploration is energy given to a way of thinking as opposed to other things it may be given to.

Not sure I got that right. Do you mean that what we think about changes the All-D? (I would say the universe, but I’m trying to be clear that I mean “everything.)

No, because all versions are thinking and so all possible versions exist of what the All-D result would be as a result of such thinking or non-thinking. But it does mean that what you think about changes the All-D for you.

“As a man thinks, so he is.” But is there any real effect of our efforts, then?

Is there any real effect if you do or don’t use the barbells?

I don’t know, it seems so self-referential. Build your own reality.

And maybe that is what that saying actually means, have you thought of that?

No. Say more?

If reality is infinite and you can know – that is, can live in – only a given subset, doesn’t it matter how you think, hence how you experience?

Huh. So, back to Thoreau’s quotation again.

Isn’t it obvious, and hopeful, once you see it in that context?

To be honest, it should be, but I’m not sure I actually feel that way. I’d still like to think I was getting somewhere with all this exploring.

That is because you are confusing scales. You aren’t at the moment experiencing psychic inflation – and you should say “thank God for that,” and I know you do – but there is what we might call psychic de-flation, a feeling that because you can’t do everything, there is no use in doing anything. That is equally inaccurate and has its dangers no less than psychic inflation. You are not demigods, and yet you are in close contact with demigods, and by right, as family, you might say. You are not worms, and yet again there is a family connection. So how you define yourselves is a matter of how you choose to define yourselves. It isn’t primarily a matter of being confined by certain facts grim or otherwise.

Well, this gives us material to chew on. Thanks.

Keep encouraging the building of a community of thought and speculation and endeavor. It is as intangible yet as important as any other single thing you could do.

Okay. See you next time. Thanks again.