Nathaniel on context and understanding

Nathaniel on context and understanding

Monday, January 29, 2018

2:55 a.m. Giving up trying to sleep when the body doesn’t seem to want to. So, let’s continue, shall we?

Given the context of what you are, and who you are, relative to the rest of reality, given that your non-3D component has its hopes and wishes just as the 3D component does, and that sometimes they clash, and given that what happens in 3D affects the rest of the All-D creature – that is, affects your non-3D components no less than your selves – perhaps you can see a bit more clearly this entire idea of sin. Sin as missing the mark; sin as obstacle to your fulfilling your natures; sin as choice of response to the winds that blow through the structures that you are. It is true that you are in 3D to choose as you will. It is not true that all choices are equally desirable, or that there is no absolute standard. But it is true that there is no way to codify that standard more specifically than in terms of your goal of fulfilling your nature and clarifying your solution.

I hesitated over that final word, because I knew you meant clarifying in the sense of removing the sediment from a liquid, but I didn’t think the meaning would necessarily be clear.

Presumably it is now. So let us talk about lust. What is it, what is it not? How can it be considered to be one of only seven major channels of error? And isn’t it, after all, only what may be expected of creatures in bodies?

Your rhetorical questions; your responsibility to answer them. But I get the sense that it is going to be more difficult for you this time than it would have been if not for our digressions. Why is that?

Not more difficult, but we had to break stride, and now it is a matter of syncing up with you again.

Weren’t we in sync in the digressing?

We were, but where we are and where you are when we begin a discussion makes a difference in possibility. So we have to re-align ourselves. This is true of anyone dealing with their own guidance, of course, and it is a process that usually goes on automatically, but not always.

Would it be easier if we changed to discuss a different sin, or one of the virtues?

No. It would be easier if you could have slept longer so that you could be at a different place.

It’s too early to make coffee.

Yes it is, but perhaps you should read or do something routine until you can fall asleep for a while.

Things will realign while I sleep?

More like, your energy wells will refill. This requires a greater level of alertness than you realize, which is one reason why it is fatiguing.

Like Hemingway and the Spanish waiter who was contemptuous because Hemingway told him he was exhausted after writing three short stories in one day. “Three little stories and you are tired,” the waiter said, to Hemingway’s great amusement. I am my own Spanish waiter, I take it, not recognizing how much goes into the task.

At times, yes.

Very well. And I take it that, as usual, this is meant not just for me.

7:40 a.m. To resume –

You might think lust a matter of sexual attraction between – or even among – bodies, and nothing more. Not so. In fact, not even that much. Look at it while remembering that sin is a natural quality that, when mixed with the wrong kind of pride in the wrong kind of way, leads you astray from where you want to go.

And, “which you?”, I imagine.

Of course, which you. We hesitate among alternate ways to proceed, each of which will present to view different nuances, and hence will seem to present slightly or even significantly different results.

Let us begin with the aspect of how you in 3D see yourselves. There are more possibilities than perhaps you realize.

  • Animals in a material world with no non-3D dimensions and therefore no hereafter, no purpose. “A useless passion,” to quote Sartre.
  • Animals in a material world with a spirit that somewhat mysteriously continues into another realm after physical death, there to meet either judgment, and hence heaven or hell, or, shall we call it self-judgment or judgment by impersonal standards, and hence reincarnation on earth for another try.
  • Animal manifestations of spirit, in a world that is material but is not the be-all-and-end-all that the previously named views assume. A testing ground, a shaping force, for unspecified future endeavors.
  • Spirit manifesting as creatures in a world equally spiritual in nature, equally manifesting in physical creation.

You can see that each view of things comes with its own set of implied limitations, which, being mostly beneath the level that would come to consciousness, will be very resistant to being changed by mental persuasion or physical (so to speak) experience. The very existence of the interplay of your mental structures and the vast impersonal forces that play through them will be unsuspected in some views. In others, they will be greatly misunderstood. Such limitations have consequences. Each set of limitations will have its own set of effective or ineffective restraints, guidelines, encouragements, reinforcements, dangers, opportunities. You see?

Yes. The same world at any given time is occupied by people at all these levels of being, each of which has its own appropriate conditions, many of which contradict each other as one moves from one to another.

Not “moves from” in the sense of one’s personal journey, but “moves from” in the sense of traveling in foreign parts.

Yes, that’s what I meant, and I see that wouldn’t have been clear.

Given this context, let it serve as a reminder that any new insights we are able to provide will be helpful, will make sense, will offer new possibilities, only to those who begin at a certain place. To the others it must appear to be nonsense, possibly as satanic misdirection. More importantly, it is vital that you and those who read this realize that more sophisticated understandings do not obviate the need for less sophisticated, even outmoded, ones. Yes, for you they will no longer do. But what about those who are unable to reach the starting-point from which you proceeded? Should we leave them with nothing? For, if we offer views understandable only to a relative few, the many must be lost or must cling to what conceptualizations will serve. And, lest you be tempted (Pride, again) to think yourselves special, consider how many levels of understanding there may be that are still well beyond yours, and people quietly living them. The goal is never uniformity, but individual experience.

Thus culture is always a clash of mis-mated understandings?

That might be stated far more clearly and carefully.

All right. We always live in the world among others who perceive and judge it very differently; hundreds, perhaps thousands or millions of different world-views, quietly or silently held, motivating behavior in very different ways, toward often very different ends.

Life in 3D – and in non-3D, you see, necessarily – is always a matter of disparate forces intermingled and interacting. Do not expect to come up with any one code suitable to one and all. Hence, the existence of organized religion and of shall we say organized philosophies; hence, too, the fact that they are always to some degree compromises, for they are riding many horses at the same time. However, by the same token, do not expect either personally or collectively to come to a natural stopping-point, beyond which no one will proceed because no one in the past has yet proceeded. There is always more.

Now, you will recall that the question was, “which you,” and you will perhaps see now that this meant not only, which of your centers of gravity, 3D or non-3D, should take the helm, but also meant the same in rather an impersonal way.

I do not understand the latter bit.

Each of you is your society – your time – in miniature. In a holographic universe (a metaphor, but a useful one), all your times (and that means all your incarnated fellows) reside within each of you, experienced mostly as qualities, and occasionally as inclinations or even impulses.

I see. Fairly radical thought, that.

Is it? It is the same thought you have been able to hold about our lives in the non-3D world; if true in non-3D, necessarily true of you in 3D, for you extend into non-3D and non-3D into 3D, as we seem to need to occasionally remind you. You are all members one of another. You are all holographic representatives of All That Is. You are all communities as well as individuals. Only now, we shall begin to move beyond the understandings of these facts that you have come to. We shall continue to do so until you find yourself unable to continue for one or another reason.

Lay on, Macduff, and cursed be he who first cries, “Hold, enough!”

So you say. And, we concede, so you have acted, at least to this point. Very well, you are all part of one thing, in ways you may not have considered until this point. That connection, scarcely comprehended, often mis-apprehended, manifests in various ways throughout your lives. Your 3D existence is continually affected by your own imperfectly experienced non-3D experience. And it is in the deliberate sabotaging of the interrelationship that what is known as sin consists. That sabotage, that interference, may be seen as a wrongful attitude, that is, an incorrect perception leading to harmful results, manifesting in one of seven ways, as has long been outlined.

Lust, envy, gluttony, covetousness, anger, pride, sloth (or ennui). LEG CAPS, as I encapsulated them, for easier recall.

It is not that these are forbidden as unseemly, nor that they are wrong because forbidden, nor, in fact, that they are forbidden at all, but that they are warned against, as in navigation one sites markers to warn against shoal waters. The water may look no different from deeper, safer waters, but the rocks below will be unforgiving of the hull that encounters them.

And here is an additional hour, besides the 20 minutes I put in earlier.

Perhaps you can see the difference in feel as you proceeded.

I could. If I had greater stamina, perhaps we could proceed more quickly.

Slow and steady wins the race, not that we are racing anyone.

The clock, perhaps?

Until next time.

Yes. Thanks as always.

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