Nathaniel – tiers and flight simulators

Sunday, October 8, 2017

5 a.m. It is so easy to lose the thread of the argument. Glancing back at the previous few entries, I see that you were going somewhere, but I don’t know where, or how you propose to get there, so I hope you do. We didn’t leave bread crumbs last time, to tell us where to resume.

We recognize that it is difficult for individuals to hold on to a continuing theme while moving thorough the accidents and distractions of the ever-flowing present 3D moment, but remember, your anchor, your un-moving non-3D aspect allows you to remain oriented – if you orient to it rather than to your flowing mind.

Let me restate that. I’m pretty sure you mean, the ever-flowing 3D timestream carries the 3D part of our consciousness along with it, making us like a raft on a river, but the part of us that resides in the rest of All-D, the non-flowing non-3D, does not get carried along on a moving river, but rests firmly on solid ground, and the two aspects of us are connected but are not always conscious of each other unless we make the effort to make them so. Whew, that didn’t turn out to be so easy to restate, but I think that more or less gets it.

The point is, the “you” that you customarily, or let us say automatically, identify with, is not invariant. When it centers on 3D life and takes for granted 3D conditions, it is in effect limited in what it can do, what it can associate, what it can remember. When, instead, it connects with the non-3D and sees 3D life as a subset of All-D, it takes for granted an entirely more expanded view of 3D life, and it experiences limits that are significantly more expanded.

Just as Thoreau said in Walden, that I have quoted in the past.

That’s right. As we have often said – or, let’s put it this way. In the case of what we are doing, or let’s say in this kind of exploring, it isn’t traversing the terrain that is unique, it is in the reporting in modern language.

Yes, I got that. I don’t expect us to see what human eyes have never seen, only to maybe interpret what we see in language (and amid associations) that have never been used before, for the sake of translating to a new civilization.

Tell me this, why is my language so convoluted this morning? It seems to me that I am having a hard time making simple statements.

Sink in, relax, stop pressing.

Okay, I get that. Pressing too hard.

It is well to want to succeed, but inefficient to push the river.

Okay. So, your turn.

You feel the difference. It is a matter of trust, in a way. Trust that the information will flow even when you yourself (consciously, in 3D terms) don’t know what it is to be or even where it is to begin.

And as usual, this information-flow is part information on the subject at hand, and part on the process itself. I get that.

Correct. Very well. The underlying theme is your lives in 3D as conduits of vast impersonal forces. How can your lives be both personal and impersonal, both contingent, even accidental, and firmly rooted and determined? As we said, it is soul (pattern) flowing spirit (energy) through it. And the question beyond this is, why? What’s it all for? What is going on?

We began to sketch the impact on your lives of negative forces, only that is an awkward way of putting it. Let’s regroup.

As always, “as above, so below.” Looking at your third-tier lives, see the continuities.

I need to go back and find that description. Or, come to think of it, no I don’t: Just tell us again.

First tier, the 3D experience in its own terms.

Second tier, the internal reaction to the physical events.

Third tier, the effect on the being of that second-tier reaction. In other words, how the transitory becomes the continuing part of the fabric of the soul. (Of course that doesn’t mean this cannot be counteracted or modified later. We are only describing the classification scheme connecting the somewhat-real 3D experience to the more real All-D situation.)

Reassuring that when it was needed, you could provide it. It would have been disconcerting if it wasn’t there and I had to go looking. Okay, and –

Let’s put it this way. If you want to understand your lives, start with what is most familiar, the first-tier experience that happens to you firsthand and that is reported to you by the world around you – friends, news media, books and films, everything. In other words, begin with the world as it is reported to you. Not only wars and rumors of war, but passions and rumors of passions, predicaments and rumors of predicaments. Start with the dramas of everyday life at first-hand and at a remove. We want to explain life, not explain it away.

Surely it is obvious that life consists of negative and positive emotions and experiences. No need for careful definition here; you know what we mean. Those experiences and all their manifestations (or perhaps we should say, and every way in which they can be sorted into categories) are not incidental to life. They are life, or let us say they are the fabric of life, the essential background of life.

It is true that some people in their yearning for peace and for meaning would transcend all this if they could. And it is true that some religions and philosophies argue that such transcendence is the only worthwhile goal of a life, all else being Maya. It is also true that in a way this is an accurate perception, for certainly the 3D world as it presents itself is not nearly as real as the casual observer assumes. But there is a difference between seeing the only-relative-reality of the life you lead (on the one hand) and deciding that 3D life is a waste of time, so to speak, a fraud, a snare, a delusion. Just because you wake up for a moment and realize that the events of Hamlet are not the reality you have been experiencing it as (because of the excellence of the performance, perhaps), that doesn’t mean it wasn’t affecting you. Similarly, life.

For some reason – certainly not a logical association of ideas, at least if it is I can’t see the logic – I think of flight simulators.

A good analogy up to a point. A flight simulation machine gives you a somewhat-real experience that prepares you for the real thing. By simulating the first-tier experience (that is, simulating the physical sensations), it allows you to experience the second-tier experience (the intellectual, kinesthetic, emotional reaction to the first-tier data), so that in a sense you will form third-tier reaction-patterns based on what you have become by having done through that experience. This is not an exact analogy, remember, but it is a useful one. Don’t parrot it, but do chew on it and see what further analogies suggest themselves.

Well, I get, just because you realize that what you thought was flight is actually a simulator, don’t jump to the conclusion that flight itself is an unobtainable illusion.

Well, actually, isn’t it more logical to assume that if this is a simulator, it is a simulator in aid of something? Preparing you for real flight, perhaps? The conclusion that the world is only relatively real may lead you to conclude that it is a meaningless charade, but it doesn’t have to. It is, shall we say, at least equally probable that life means something, is in aid of something, is preparation for something. Otherwise it’s a lot of money, time, and effort to create a simulator just to fool you.

Smiling. I figure you guys (we guys, I realize) work for MGM or Industrial Light and Magic.

Not so unflattering a comparison. They do produce remarkably effective second-tier experience, even though they think they’re in business to make money.

As we say, start with what you know. Next time we will begin at this point: Looking at 3D life as you experience it, what does it hint at regarding the underlying reality it suggests and mirrors?

All right. Our thanks for this, as always. Till next time.