Nathaniel on levels of reality

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

5:50 a.m. it’s interesting to see the difference between what I experience and what people read into that experience, even people who know me very well. Yesterday’s exchange, for instance. I experienced it, as always, as smooth, even flow. Statement, response. Question, response. One thing leading to the next, no emotion involved. The closest I have ever come to an emotion in any of these conversations, as far as I can recall, is humor. We’ll exchange jokes, or we will be amused by the other’s attitude or assumption or reaction.

But that isn’t what people read. They read into the record, anger, chastisement, even, yesterday, cantankerousness. And it isn’t so much any particular individual’s misreading, but a general atmosphere that establishes itself around the conversations. And, since I can occasionally detect suspicious fingerprints when they are smudgy enough, I suspect that you encouraged me to mention this for reasons of your own. Your move.

Take that same difference between communication as you experience it essence to essence, and the record it leaves, the effect it produces, when people read it via 3D clues (written words, inferred attitudes, analogies to what would be if it were a conventional person-to-person interaction), and you get a sense of the difference between All-D and 3D perspectives on 3D life.

I almost get it, but not quite.

That’s all right, because there is quite a lot to say. Let’s make it easy to follow, by coding it. So, in our interactions, you, the 3D-plus-non-3D intelligence, we’ll call A. We, the non-physical intelligence you communicate with, we’ll call B. Your readers, separately or together, we’ll call C.

So, physical – A. Non-physical – B. Observer – C. Over-simplified, but it will do. These have their counterpart beyond the 3D world, and the part that may be confusing is that A and C extend into the non-3D and know they do, yet continually forget they do. So let’s call your non-3D component A2 and your readers’, C2.

A interacts with B, and C observes. But really, A and A2 interact with B, and C and C2 observe. As you have noted, interactions tend to be experienced this way: A2 and B, and experienced by C as if A and B.

Yes, I’m following you so far.

Well, why should that be? Why (since C and C2 are the same) should it not be experienced by C as A2 and B?

I get it.

Proceed.

It depends on how we observe, doesn’t it? If we observe using sensory cues, it appears to be A and B. Only if we observe giving intuition primacy over sensory do we perceive it as A2 and B.

Close enough for the moment. All right, draw and extend the analogy. Look at the world around you.

Yes, I see it. If we look at it and read only the sensory clues – or, I guess, if we only read the evidence using our sensory apparatus and its reporting, its logic, its deductions – the world looks one way. If we read the same thing in an intuitive way, it reads differently.

Again, not quite. But you’re on the trail. The point remains that the world you experience is only somewhat real, even in its own terms. It is more real, seen through C2 lenses.

It’s a difficult concept to really grasp. We can get it abstractly, easily enough, but when we come to apply it, it can seem like explaining things away.

We understand. That’s what we are trying to do right now, give you an intellectual connecting principle – a hook, you say – to tie in what you experience within yourselves and what you experience outside of yourselves, because it is so hard for you to perceive (as opposed to knowing abstractly) that inner and outer are the same reality experienced through two different filters.

The world hurts! You, observing the world, hurt, because you take it as real. But – it is and it isn’t. What C experiences is qualitatively different from what C2 experiences, and the difference inheres in C, not in the world.

In a way, that’s saying what Hemingway said? That we’re making a mistake in thinking that others react to their situation in the way that we would react if we were in it?

You’ve seen it yourself, and I dare say everybody who reads this, present or future, has seen it too. One’s “personal experience” can never be translated accurately. You can’t express it and the other person can’t absorb it, just the way it is, because there are too many unnamable variables within each 3D individual to make translation possible. Because you extend into non-3D, because you experience partly intuitively, something of the emotional reality and the inexpressible experience can jump, can arc over, but only some. The actual flavor of everyone else’s life can only be approximated, can only be guessed at. Who understands how asthma has flavored your life? Who, understanding this, understands the effects – each combined with the others – of asthma and reading and hero-worship and early Catholicism and a thousand emotional incentives and motivators and what we might call anti-incentives and anti-motivators? Who can add in ambitions and disinclinations, insights and prejudices, penetration and blindness, etc., etc.? Nobody, nor could you do the equivalent for anybody else.

This may not seem a very valuable insight, but when it clicks in, it may. You are all infinite mysteries to each other, you know that. Even when the other is known to the point of predictability, of boredom even, the core will remain a mystery to others and even to yourself. It’s one thing to say “know thyself,” but it is another thing entirely to know how to go about it.

Yet, observing the world, it is that very mistake that you do make, and most naturally. You assume you know what the napalmed child feels. We choose a horrible example purposely; there’s no point in using only easy cases.

It doesn’t take any great insight or empathy to know that the child hurts!

Of course not, and the ability to empathize is part of being human. A very valuable part. However –

All right, let’s extend our analogy. C is the observer, C2 is the observer plus its non-3D component. Another way of putting it, loosely, would be that C is the observer using only sensory input, C2 is the observer observing with intuition as well as sensory data. But what is the outside view of C’s observation-point? What is the view that watches C’s progress through 3D life with interest and involvement, but does not interfere, because to interfere would actually impede? Call that observer C3.

You may need to talk a little more about C3 (bearing in mind that in our world, C4 is a powerful explosive.

Yes, a joke, but you find C and C2 explosive enough, in everyday reality.

What we called B is really B3 as observed by A and C. We, here, do not exist as 3D-only, obviously, and we cannot even be said to be B2, which would imply that we were 3D using intuitive means.

I see that.

Well, from the C3 level, life looks, feels, is, different. It is the difference between watching an execution or a gunfight or a car accident in person (or on a news program), and watching them in a story, characters portrayed by actors. Anyone with empathy is going to be stirred even by drama – that’s the purpose of drama, after all, to stir emotions – but no sane person confuses drama with reality. Matt Damon doesn’t get shot just because Jason Bourne does. Tom Hank doesn’t die in Normandy just because the schoolteacher Captain does.

Well, I don’t know, drama can carry a powerful kick, and some of us can confuse it with reality. I can well remember being heart-sick as a little kid at the ending of Tarzan of the Apes, and I can remember being rapt with tension at some TV show and my father laughing and telling me, “it’s just a story,” and my complicated reaction to that – regretting being taken out of it, and becoming aware of where I had been, and retaining the consciousness of that awakening. And I still get thoroughly involved with characters in some novels [and videos], especially in a continuing series. Hornblower, Castle, Inspector Grant.

And you make our point for us. Remember, these are created beings, like yourselves but at another level removed. Real but not as real. Embodying characteristics made plain by their adventures. To the degree that you care about them – and you can come to identify, in a way, even with characters who embody characteristics opposite to your own, in fact that can be the strongest identification – you enter into their reality. The surroundings and the plots don’t need to be realistic, because it isn’t as if you were identifying with their external experiences. You identify with their reactions. You feel their reactions as if they were yours. They enliven an existing but slow-flowing current within you. Hence the popularity of mysteries and romance novels. As art, they usually come to not much. But as doorways to your own interiors, well, that’s why they appeal.

So we are a TV series to the next highest level of reality?

Let’s say you are actors who are pretty intense, and often get lost in your roles. It is the surfacing to breathe, remembering that you are an actor with, perhaps, a mortgage or a favorite car, that reminds you that life is realer than the drama you are (legitimately) engaged in, immersed in. And that’s enough for now.

Yes, 70 minutes. Okay, more next time. Thanks.