Nathaniel on Anastasia’s question (3)

Monday, December 4, 2017

4:55 a.m. Still pursuing the question, why are we on this timeline. I re-read the previous two entries last night, as a sort of preparation, but I don’t really have it in my head. Not my job anyway. I trust you have something to tell us today.

The key is to stop considering the subject as if 3D-you were the key to it. It isn’t. The key is connectivity. Once you alter your viewpoint to consider yourself and your own awareness as only a small part of the picture, things straighten out. It is the thinking of yourselves as autonomous units that causes the disorientation.

Obvious, as you say it. I suppose it is direct feed, giving me the idea behind it.

We won’t stop to explore the question of where direct feed comes from, in an ILC link. Perhaps you realize, now, that it is one of the meaningless questions.

We will continue to come back to one key: “As above, so below.” You are beginning to see how many things this rule of thumb illustrates, but we encourage you to apply it continually, creatively, in exploring such subjects, because, again, the universe is coherent, structured, predictable (in effect), once you have the approach: in this particular case, the fact that at any level, the being under discussion may be considered to be a part of a higher community and, at the same time, a higher self of a community of beings at a lower level of organization. That is clumsy, but the idea ought to survive the phrasing.

Once you adopt this point of view as a master key to the situation, you realize that considering any individual as if it were a totally free agent, able to do whatever it wished, unconstrained by circumstances beyond its own will, is but a misunderstanding of the situation.

Nothing in the universe exists in a state of disconnection. Therefore nothing exists in a state of lostness or of absolute freedom – which is two ways of saying the same thing. To think of yourself or of Sam or of anything as absolutely independent is to entirely misapprehend the situation. It can’t possibly be the case that, in a universe without absolute divisions, there could be any absolute separation of anything, no matter how large, no matter how small – and in saying “large” and “small” we refer not so much to physical dimensions as to any and all ways of looking at things.

Surely this is clear, once stated? Obvious, we mean.

It is clear to me, anyway, and at the moment. Whether later and to others, I can’t say.

Here and now will do. Well, if this is so – and we assure you, it is – it should also be clear that nothing can be understood without understanding the context within which it exists. That context is an indivisible part of the thing being considered.

I see that clearly enough. In case someone doesn’t, I’ll say this. If you look at anything – particularly if you set out to analyze it, to understand it – you are going to have to examine it in isolation. There is no choice. But how you examine it in isolation will make all the difference in how well or badly you understand it. The better you understand its context, the better you understand it. Looking at a ball bearing in itself will tell you nothing of a particular use for the ball bearing in a machine, for instance.

All right, so if that much is clear, extrapolate. You can’t tell much about a blood cell if you examine only the blood cell – in however much detail – without having in mind its function in a circulatory system. A red blood cell is a unit, and like everything in the universe has consciousness particular to itself, but whatever its ideas of its function may be, they are unlikely to comprehend itself as a tiny transient part of a vastly larger function that is comprehensible only on a larger scale. No matter if it is human blood, or the blood of a lion, the blood cell’s nature, function, purpose, is only really discernible in the context of the higher being whose purpose it serves.

Now, does this mean the cell is being “used” in the sense of being manipulated? Obviously not. You cannot argue that a subsystem is abused or cheated by functioning as it is designed to function. If your blood cell were to achieve “freedom” and isolation from the body it served, what good would that do the cell? It would be of no use; its existence would be literally meaningless and in fact absurd.

You’d wind up with a bunch of little Sartres, exclaiming, “Blood cells are a useless passion.”

Of course you would. And at the other extreme, blood cells who imagined that they would be judged by the higher being that they intuited serving would be likely to set up rules for their behavior – as if those rules were not innate and unalterable in the nature of things.

Using blood cells as example does make our own position clear by analogy.

It always will. Do you want to understand something in your life? Find the appropriate analogy at a lower level or higher level, and extrapolate. Not that this won’t steer you wrong sometimes, but that is a function of fallibility, not of an inadequate guide.

Do we need to consider the “freewill” aspect of the blood cell’s situation? I think the context shows us pretty clearly the determining limits of its existence.

Tell of your experience with the microscope.

My friend Jim Meissner had what I think he called a dark-field microscope. This allowed us to examine living blood cells, not only dead cells. So, a drop of blood on the slide, and it was a fascinating array of mutually interacting creatures, red and white cells. You could see the occasional white cell devour things, for instance. I gather that what you want this illustration for is that the cells appeared to float and interact.

No, the particular illustration is that the white cells appeared to choose, to be attracted in certain directions and then choose how to react. Free will? External direction? Meaningless at that level, maybe meaningless at your level. The entire “free will or no free will” debate at your level is meaningless because it looks at you as if you were in an impossible isolation. The white cell cannot choose to be in a different drop of blood; to a degree it cannot choose whether to react or how to react to the sensed presence of its natural prey. And yet, within these limits, it can, does, and in fact must choose its exact movements, even its larger strategies, so to speak.

Taking a jump here, because this popped into my mind as I was writing that – disobedience?

Continue the analogy. A white cell has its own nature. It lives in an environment it could never escape (and why would it? What would it do, outside the blood stream it was fashioned to play a key role in?) It follows instinct (or, call it the higher self’s purpose) and is fulfilled. But if the white cell turns upon its fellows and begins to rend the cells around it, it ceases to follow its nature and ceases to function as part of a balanced system. There isn’t much point in accusing the cell of moral failing – how can you know the nature or limits of its consciousness? – but, at least in effect, it becomes a rogue element.

The same thing happens at your level, and you may if you wish amuse yourselves trying to determine if criminal elements are so because they were born that way or society mis-shaped them or they deliberately said, “Evil, be thou my good.” The fact remains that elements of any system that begin to function as if they themselves were all that mattered become an obstacle to the system and, we may say, a problem to themselves. However, this doesn’t mean they are an inexplicable error in the system’s design. Any manifestation that is so persistent and that analogously appears in other systems must be considered – perhaps paradoxically – a part of the system.

Trickster, again.

That’s right. And we will resume from here. Bear it in mind: connectivity.

 

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