Nathaniel — the limits of understanding

Saturday, October 14, 2017

6 a.m. Ready?

You might type in the thoughts and realizations that came to you after yesterday’s session. It all comes together, and there isn’t any reason for you to assume that guidance or insight goes off duty when you cap your pen or pick up a book to read. Indeed, part of the lesson of life is living in connection at all times. It enriches your life and changes your ability to be who you really want to be.

[Friday afternoon:

[Re-reading Rita (3-7-16) I suddenly got that people who see the afterlife as an endless research project, endless learning, are merely projecting an earth-oriented attitude that equates curiosity with part of human nature, and assumes that such curiosity is going to be aimed at “the nature of things” just as it may be while in 3D. but there’s more to life than understanding the nature of things. More even than to understanding our own nature. Even the kind of work I’m doing now is only part “what the world is really like”; it is also, “how can we help those who read it?” In other words, love still trumps brain. We are here – and there – primarily to love. But I don’t know how this works out in practice.

[Later:

[Re-wiring! That is what moral training is, what discipline is, etc. Where the winds blow, we don’t want to have to react as programmed. We want not only to be able to resist but, in a way, not to have to. (Watching “Rear Window” with Christopher Reeve suggested this.)

[Things happen. We react according to our permanent or OEM wiring as modified by our software wiring. Over time we can change our reactions, as Washington and Marshall did.]

[Typing this up, I can see that what were notes for my own use may not be clear to others. OEM = Original Equipment Manufacturer; in other words, how we are fashioned at the time we enter 3D life. Software wiring = our own changes in the original configuration. George Washington and George Marshall are two outstanding examples of men who molded their character by rigid self-discipline.]

“Re-wiring,” you see, is a major summary of your task and potential in 3D life. You have the potential to be one branch of the decision-tree that changes, that becomes an alternate path for the winds blowing through. If you were the only real timeline, you can see that this would mean you were, to a tiny degree, helping to shape the passage of those forces; to a tiny degree you would be participating in a war of good against evil, say. But, as all possible niches are filled and are equally real, as all paths exist and all paths are taken, this cosmic warfare is only one way to interpret what people would call “spiritual” reality. This is in fact the inevitable result when one looks at these forces, and your ability to choose how to channel these forces – if there were only one reality, one time-line, one set of choice-and-results. So you get Manichean warfare of good and evil; Christian and Jewish warfare of God and Devil, same thing; secular versions of fighting for a better world against the forces of evil, same thing.

And those who see or intuit that all paths are taken are tempted to see it all as meaningless paly, or chaos.

We, and hardly just “Nathaniel and company” or Rita or Seth, are here to say that neither of these extreme views is correct. The world is neither an on-going Armageddon nor a tedious self-indulgent spectacle.

Well, that’s how I feel [i.e. agreeing with what was just said], but I admit, I have a hard time justifying the feelings. I mostly have to live on faith that my knowing isn’t wrong. I mean, logic cuts against it. What is the point of re-wiring if it doesn’t matter even to my own moral character, much less its effect on the rest of the world?

You do realize, there is less difference in those two parts of your sentence than appears?

Oh, abstractly. Yes, we’re all so interconnected, I forget sometimes when I’m thinking in other contexts. But still, even if changing myself amounts to having an effect on all that I connect to – and vice-versa – it is hard to understand the point of it, when all other versions of the decision-tree, mine and everybody else’s (impossible to really absorb how vast that must be) cancel out. If we are only showing what happens in each case – if we are only printing-out the tree in detail, so to speak – what does it mean really? I mean, what are we accomplishing?

Go with your deepest feelings, always. They are the “you” of you. Note, we don’t say go with your emotions, your transitory waves of feeling, we say feelings, your nature as it may be felt by you. There is a difference. Your feelings tell you it is not meaningless. Cling to that. (We don’t mean cling to the conclusion. If the conclusion changes, still cling to whatever your feelings tell you.)

Look to the first paragraph you copied from yesterday, that you thought unconnected to the second and third. It provides you a clue. It is a mistake – a natural one, but a mistake – to think that reality translates into human terms, even with respect to humans.

Is it?

Suppose you were to try to explain the purpose of the universe, and reality-streams, and the passage of waves of emotion through 3D compound beings – to the cells comprising your body? Or to a cloud, or a flower? You couldn’t. They all embody consciousness, as everything does, but it is a different kind of consciousness, each living in effect in its own universe (in that each has its own very different range of inputs). Just as you couldn’t explain a baseball game to an amoeba, nor the processing of blood sugars to a muscle cell, so we can’t explain things beyond your range. Willingness to explain, and willingness to have it explained, have nothing to do with it. It is a matter – as you often say – of having or not having receptors for the information.

If you weren’t minds existing in the All-D as well as effective consciousnesses living within 3D constraints, we couldn’t even say this much. We would be obliged to try to explain your lives strictly in 3D terms.

I see. That’s pretty – well, I can’t think of the word. Not off-putting, though that word keeps suggesting itself. It almost puts me into neutral. I hear you saying, life does have a purpose, but there’s no explaining it, you can’t understand.

No need to be quite so taken aback. There is a difference between explaining everything and explaining some things. Just because you cannot expect to understand everything, don’t jump to the conclusion that you cannot understand anything, nor that the amount you can understand must be trivial.

It does seem that way, at first blush.

That – we say to you bluntly – is because of your intellectual arrogance. You will not understand your potential until you understand the limits of your potential, or, we should say more carefully, until you realize that your potential has limits, however ill-defined they may be.

It shouldn’t need saying – but it does! – that in using the words “intellectual arrogance” we are not addressing them to only one of you, or to some of you, but to all of you, without exception. And we have no slightest doubt that each of you will be tempted to exempt yourself, and say, “In my case it isn’t intellectual arrogance, it’s just that I am curious and I am searching for the truth, whatever it may be.” To which we say, in vintage American, “Oh, yeah?”

Surely you are not discounting or criticizing the sincere yearning for understanding that brings us to these conversations.

Indeed we are not. We are criticizing – by bringing to the light of your consciousness – the unacknowledged limits of that sincere yearning, the point at which yearning for truth becomes (unnoticed) clinging to the familiar.

If I get you right, you are saying we tend to think the universe can be comprehended in human terms. But – can’t it?

Certainly it can, but no more so than comprehending it in terms of flowers or rocks or horses.

Each of which explanations would be a very truncated version of reality – I get that. So what’s the use of what we’re doing here?

Remember, stay with your feelings. Your feelings tell you this isn’t meaningless and is not a description of meaninglessness. Listen to them. Don’t let an idea overrule your feelings. If we may say so, that is a very common intellectual mistake.

You know, for the first time I feel as well as think and hope and believe that in bringing this information in, I really am in contact with something beyond my own mind.

Well – that difference is less than you realize. Given that everybody and everything is connected, anything you get could be seen as a message from a remote portion of “your” mind. However, in the terms you mean, yes, good.

And we think we will leave you for the moment with that shock to the system still fresh. You understand, it wasn’t meant as an insult but as a description.

I do. And, it was a very illuminating one. Very well, till next time, then.