Escaping the prison cell

Re-reading my messages from Rita, I came to this:

Now, none of this is a detour or a side-trail. It is important for every person who is reading this or ever will read this, because one of the most important concepts they need to absorb is that “the way the world is” is the most efficient prison ever constructed, but the door of the cell has the key on the inside!

Vivid metaphor.

And that is precisely what I’m talking about, today. You don’t move people by argument or by intellectual understanding alone. You do it by vivid images, easily grasped, easily remembered. The complication is that you also move people by a vivid image who haven’t heard, or wouldn’t have been able to follow, the arguments leading to the more sophisticated understanding. So in their case they have traded in one belief and drawn another belief from the deck. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that – people are too quick to criticize the way the world maintains itself – but recognize, that is a very different situation.

A belief snatched at is a superstition, as opposed to a belief grown into?

Let’s say, in the absence of internal guidance that would be a true enough description. Let’s say rationality plays a smaller part in people’s mental world than they sometimes think it does – and there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, it is often their saving grace, leading them to act better than their conscious beliefs would lead them to.

All right. I’m a little at sea as to where we’re going, here.

Surely you don’t think the ex-3D soul’s experiences as it reorients itself are unaffected by the beliefs that shaped it in its 3D years, do you?

[Pause] I’m having to ponder that. Meaning – so be careful what you let yourself believe?

No, not at all.  You won’t have all that much control over what you find yourself believing. Meaning, so maybe there is a purpose to the creation of various environments for 3D life (and not just on earth, either, I remind you). Maybe the creation of certain environments allows the formation of certain types of minds, and maybe the existence of different belief-systems in the 3D minds that result are valued in and for themselves.

I’m sitting here pretty much in neutral, trying to grasp so many implications. One of them is – our 3D experiences are meant to help shape or reshape the non-3D environment.

That’s correct. The 3D isn’t just an amusement park.

And that implies that the non-3D feels a need for 3D-shaped souls with certain biases, for some reason.

How often do people go to so much trouble to build something, if they don’t expect to profit from it? I don’t mean milk it, but get some good out of it?

That’s sure not the way we’re accustomed to thinking of it – either this world or the next world.

No, and look how “the next world” has gone dead on you. It doesn’t inspire, it doesn’t seem real and comprehensible. Some people desperately cling to the hope of another world, some cling to the hope of another 3D life, some cling to the idea of living their one life with their achievements as a legacy. Some can’t believe but need to, and so they overlay a frantic fanaticism over their disbelief. And, of course, some conclude that life is meaningless, and console themselves by the thought that they are the only grown-ups in the room.

So, we’re doing our bit to alleviate the symptoms by addressing the causes of a sense of meaninglessness. But you can’t expect new understandings to spread in an instant. Well, you can, in a sense: People sometimes catch new understandings like wildfire, but don’t expect it to be a rational process, more like the flooding of the plain when a dam bursts, or like the annual flooding of the Nile. (That is a closer analogy, because not in context of a catastrophe but of a natural, regular, necessary, productive phenomenon. Egypt used to be called The Gift of the Nile, you know, for just that reason: The annual floods left topsoil.

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