Nathaniel – sin as intersection of forces

Friday, February 2, 2018

4 a.m. Shall we deal with Dirk’s question? I asked him to phrase it as though to you.

[Dirk Dunning: In speaking about lust and other vices, you attempted to describe them as the intersection between vast impersonal forces. Frank interpreted that and attempted to analogize this to weather. You said “No, that doesn’t get the idea. More like sonic booms – the effect of interaction of forces pushing through the atmosphere.”

[By this do I understand you to mean that they result from the interaction or boundary between forces? Are they then phenomena that represent the tension, stress and boundary between these forces? As such, are they then what might be called “emergent” phenomena? Or said in more plain language, are they the result of the interaction between these forces – without independent form of their own?]

The short answer would be, yes, that is what we are trying to get across. Sins are not structures in themselves, but the result – and cause – of interactions of forces. They may be regarded as side-effects (viewed as results) and as precipitators (viewed as causes).

Hmm. Is that what the church means by Original Sin? A warping causing further warping?

Without speaking for the church, we could say, that is a productive way to see it. Only, the creation stories of Genesis are intended for people whose customary framework assumes 3D conditions, so of course the fables, the myths, in which these truths are expressed are going to be distorted by 3D logic attempting to interpret non-3D phenomena, just like people’s accounts of afterdeath phenomena, and for the same reason.

Thus, you don’t need to postulate a snake in the garden making a subversive and disastrous suggestion to the first woman. Even when you translate these story elements into their psychic equivalents, it is still being told as understood by minds interpreting it as if it were a 3D story. This can hardly be avoided, but needs to be held in mind. To take those stories as codifications of important psychological truths is important, but not sufficient if you are able to carry things further. If you once remember that any story is a sequential account of simultaneously occurring events in a different environment, you save yourself confusion.

That said, don’t throw out the baby. Those stories mean something. They have importance. The fact that they may need to be decoded not once but on multiple levels does not mean they are useless; still less, that they are invented. In fact it is a sign that they are potentially important and are valuable clues. It would be well to suspect that where there are elaborately constructed and preserved clues, there may be something the clues are pointing toward! The world’s spiritual libraries were not compiled around trivia, still less around nothing.

But, to turn again. Yes, sin may be regarded as a phenomenon that occurs at the intersection of forces, the boundary – a continually fluctuating boundary – between different energies, each with its own dynamic. This is not the only way to see the phenomenon, and to see it only in this way would lose important aspects of it, but it is one way, and does shed light on what is going on. You may choose to regard it as the mechanistic aspect, as opposed to the will-driven aspect, of the situation.

What I think you just said is that we can take a systems approach to understanding life, and in so doing see it as the interaction of forces affecting our lifes, downplaying our personal interactions, or we can take a psychological approach and see it as our making choices that affect it. (And of course I recognize that in the writing of this paragraph I received additional clarity, so that I knew more by its end than I brought to its beginning.)

To respond to your parenthetical, this is how human thought nearly always works, except in the deliberate logical step-by-step construction that occasionally happens. When you “feel your way” through a problem, your non-3D component is being allowed to feed you ideas as you go, instead of your blocking it out by your own 3D-oriented thinking.

As to the content, yes, that is what we are saying. There is one reality (as we continually remind you), but it looks different from different angles, and is well worth constant reexamination.

So where do we go from here?

If you once see sin and error – and other error, we should say – as systems phenomena rather than as moral failings for which you should feel guilt, things change.

”One of those things. The kind of thing that happens in 3D.”

Yes. It relieves you from unbearable pressure, you see.

I do, but perhaps not everybody will see it automatically. It’s what I came to realize about classic Catholic guilt, it is the continual knowledge of failure to live up to a standard that, being an ideal, can’t be lived up to. It is a playing against a stacked deck, a variant on the joke about the three rules of life: (1) You can’t win, (2) You can’t break even, (3) You can’t even quit the game.

And of course at some point human flesh is going to rebel. No one can thrive under so unremitting a load of guilt. Either people throw away the code itself, which means throwing away the valuable guidelines that make sense of life, or they redefine themselves as evil – with terrible consequences – or they give up in one way or another, ending in despair.

But the answer is not to refuse to see, nor to say that everything that has been seen over the ages is wrong, nor to say, “It does not apply to me.” The answer is to see farther, and that is what we are attempting to help you to do, primarily by holding two contexts in your minds at the same time, to help you re-knit your world.

By two contexts, I get, metaphysics as we commonly see it today, and traditional religious thought, which never have anything to say to one another.

You can see the benefits of the procedure. It assists you to see your blind spots, your hot buttons, your dead-end thinking, your accustomed ways of not-seeing. We do that simply by describing things out of their ordinary contexts, but without distorting them. A systems context is no less accurate than a psychological one, and associating the two will bring clarity that can never be attained by examining either context alone. It is in discomfort that additional clarity is to be found.

Through discomfort, I take it.

Well, through it but also in it. The presence of discomfort is a useful alarm clock that wakens you from sleepwalking though the explorations.

Interesting. But you don’t mean shock for shock’s sake.

No, but when resistance or sleep is ingrained enough, that might be appropriate. Unnecessary and undesirable in a self-selected audience.

So, to reiterate. Two sets of forces, one that we have been deliberately describing in identical terms: vast impersonal forces sweeping through your lives, and what we have been looking at as structures, because they have a structural aspect, the forces of All-D beings manifesting in the 3D crucible. The interaction of these two sets of forces produces vortices.

Psychological warping?

Sometimes. But also creativity in all its aspects. Life, really. Your 3D life, we remind you, is driven not by thought or logic, still less by the pre-determination of circumstance, but by passion. When passion has constructive outlet, it manifests quite differently from when it does not. But of course “constructive” is a judgment requiring definition – but then, that is what metaphysics is, what religion does.

What? Provide definitions for what is constructive and what is not?

Can you tell us what else they do, or could do?

So we’re back to scriptures as guidance.

In a free-will universe, a crucible constructed specifically to provide an arena in which to exercise your will to create what you wish to become, what would be more important than to provide some guidance along the way?

And there’s your hour.

Well, it’s all very interesting. This one I’ll have to re-read a couple of times, I suspect. Thanks as always.

 

3 thoughts on “Nathaniel – sin as intersection of forces

  1. Just happened to be reading, in “Seth Speaks” (p. 336), “The exterior religious dramas are of course imperfect representations of the ever-unfolding interior spiritual realities…Such religious dramas focus, direct, and, hopefully, clarify aspects of inner reality that need to be physically represented… Religion per se, however, is always the external facade of inner reality. The primary spiritual existence alone gives meaning to the physical one. In the most real terms, religion should include all of the pursuits of man in his search for the nature of meaning and truth. Spirituality cannot be some isolated, specialized activity or characteristic. … The [religious] dramas themselves do express certain inner realities, and they serve as surface reminders to those who do not trust direct experience with the inner self.”
    “Don’t throw out the baby,” Nathaniel says. “Those stories mean something.”
    I’ll be re-reading this morning’s session, too.

    1. Thank you Jane I like it.
      It is always back “to the inner self” obviously.

      AND Jane ? You and I am into THE WEATHER each time when “talking together,” AND do you know what — SETH telling about the materialization of dreams and the chemical “substances” of it.

      Quote SETH from The Early Sessions, Session 189, september 20, 1965, page 26 in my book:
      “The electrical composition of the air is important, as you have read, and the periods of even temperature and fair weather are excellent for our purposes”….(And then comes something told about Jane whatshe did when taling for Seth within a paragraph)….And continues:
      “The evening hours are best, and it was for this reason that I chose them. By this hour there is apt to be a stability of electromagnetic properties, though of course this is not always the case. Since all things have an electrical and chemical reality, the food that you eat is also important, and it is for this reason that I made certain suggestions concerning your diet.
      These suggestions, as you know, were far from extreme. The exercises that I suggested Ruburt take also aid him in utilizing negative ions. EACH INDIVIDUAL has various ways in which he or she characteristically handles the protoplastic elements of which the physical being is composed. The protoplasm is not entirely physical, however, but in a basic manner is a meeting ground between physical matter nand inner vitality. Therefore the characteristic ways used by any given personality, in connection with his or her physical image, will also be used in the constructio of dream images.”

      Jane? You and I must intuitively to have known the importqnce of the weather or ? In the lase week, here with us, the fantastic blue sky, and starry winter nights are BEAUTIFUL as once upon they were back in time. A really old-fashioned winter-dream-landscape of my childhood(felt as long gone).

      1. Inger Lise, I do remember Seth talking about our mass production of weather, which sounds a lot like those vast impersonal forces. I seem to automatically connect with the state of the weather, and even though we’re having a record-breaking warm and dry winter, I can’t help but appreciate the beautiful days and starry nights. And, I agree that weather is a connecting factor across times and places, something that’s a part of our deepest memory. I’ve noticed it in dreams and past life connections. Thanks for the Seth material! I haven’t seen The Early Sessions, and this is helpful in terms of how and when I write. Still wish you lived next door! Maybe one time we did.

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