TGU — Our two-edged lives

Friday, April 6, 2018

4:45 a.m. To continue?

The throwaway line at the end of yesterday’s session is the key to many things.

“Life isn’t as easy or as straightforward as it may be made to appear merely by concentrating on one aspect and ignoring another.”

The important point is that you choose between elements of yourself. You choose, and it is in choosing that you perform your service to the universe; it is also in choosing that you mold yourself out of a greater potential, narrowing down, sharpening, cutting away the bits of stone that are not the statue, as the sculptor put it. It is a two-edged process, and how it appears depends upon which way you are facing when you look at it. Seen one way, you are choosing among vast impersonal forces, siding in a battle, or struggle, or, let’s say, a creative chaos. Seen another way, you are molding yourself according to your ideals and desires. It is the same thing, seen differently.

Do you choose to embody, or even passively endorse, cruelty? You are at the same time shaping yourself and voting that the universe shall be, to that degree, cruel. Do you choose to embody love? Same double-sided process.

Note, your actions, and their effects, are somewhat less important in shaping you than are your intent and your ideal. That is, in the shaping of oneself, third-tier effects, not first-tier or even second-tier, are what is important. But in one’s simultaneous role as one among many – that is, in your effect upon others – your third-tier effects are muffled or perhaps in effect nonexistent; there, it is one’s first-tier effects that manifest. And this, too, is the key to many things.

I have the general idea of that last, but it could do with some spelling-out.

Of course. It could, in fact, be discussed at great length. However, we will try to keep it brief. Suggestion sometimes leads better than does exposition. In a nutshell, this concerns the difference between the world a person inhabits and that person’s –

Starting again?

Well, the distinction is one which is easy to grasp, but is also difficult to describe without the possibility of misleading. People so easily misread things because a key word triggers a stray association which is silently added to the thought, distorting the meaning of what triggered the association.

Simply put: Everyone experiences themselves as one private world, an internal universe so to speak, and also as a small part of a great external world, an external universe. Mostly the two frameworks are experienced separately.

Walter Mitty?

That’s an example in one direction, an internal world so brightly lit as to leave the external world little more than a somewhat perplexing annoyance. But another example would be Albert Einstein or Abraham Lincoln or anyone who spent so much time thinking, creating internally, that their external effect however great could be said to be by-product.

Hmm. And an example of the other extreme would be –?

You surely know people who are non-reflective, who do not much seem to question or examine their inner reactions to things, who fit in the world and do not seem to have an interior very brightly lit at all.

You say we “surely know” such people, but your very language, with all that seems-ing, says we don’t know them. We guess.

That helps illustrate the point. You are each internal and external. You communicate via intuition to your inner world and via the senses to your outer world. You are one person, who cannot be expressed, to yourself, and another person to others, a person they construct by guessing at your motivations by your actions. Thus society is a collection of mysteries.

We are each mysteries to each other, you mean.

To yourselves, too, because you cannot see yourselves from the inside and the outside until you leave the 3D restriction, which you are reluctant to do for some reason.

Very funny. But I get your point.

Well, take that elementary fact of life as a starting point: You are yourselves in private and you are yourselves in your effect upon others, both, and always. It isn’t a matter of intent; it can’t be helped (and there is nothing wrong with this fact). Call it I-Self for inner self, the self only you can know, and O-Self, for outer self, the self in its effects upon others, the self you can never know very well except indirectly.

I-Self is all about molding who you want to be. O-Self is all about your vote in the larger morality play in which 3D is a part.

I was following you until this last, which isn’t what I expected.

No, because you are accustomed to thinking that who you are to yourself is what you are to others, reflected with distortions but nevertheless a reflection.

And aren’t we?

Your effect upon the world is not a simple matter. You express, but also you are used.

Explain?

Everybody sometimes “acts out of character.” Everybody sometimes says or does something, not knowing why, that turns out to be very meaningful to someone else.

Sure, I’ve used that as an example of how we sometimes act out another person’s message from guidance that they can’t hear when it is merely internal.

That is one very direct, very simple, example. But what of the fourth or sixth or eight-hundredth carom, something infinitely beyond your ability to calculate or even perceive? Think how many caroms Abraham Lincoln’s life continues to generate. That is his effect upon the world that was generated by what he was, but proceeded by the interaction between what he was and what the external situation was in which he functioned.

So you might ask, what was going on with Abraham Lincoln? He is a famous person of whom much is known; he will do as an example.

O-Self, Lincoln’s effect upon the world, was extensive and in its own way irreplaceable, because it stemmed from but was not limited to his I-Self. His political judgments could not always be predicted from his personal preferences – he was a kindly man who had to preside over a bloodbath – but they did often enough reflect these preferences, when they could.

The Civil War and all its causes and effects was part of the eternal struggle in which your lives adjust to the vast impersonal forces blowing through your times. You see? It was caused by the weather, you might say, that led certain men to do certain things and other men to do certain other things out of who they were, which then played out.

Various I-Self reasons, manifesting in the world, created O-Self conflicts, which led to greater events.

As we said, this is easily misunderstood, so tread softly. It is true enough that you could look at history in a common-sense way and come up with the idea that the conflict of various forces originates with the conflict of various men (and women), and that therefore social issues are a by-product of individual issues writ large. Or, you could just as easily say that the winds of war were blowing through the scene, and any individual’s part in it was less a matter of intent or even of character than of being in the wrong place at the wrong time (or the right place at the right time, depending upon how you look at it).

The fact to concentrate on is that the weather exists independently of the people it affects, yet at the same time it expresses through them and so its effects are modified – shaped – by the nature of the individuals it encounters, that is, by people’s past choices of values they wished to embody.

It isn’t usually seen that way.

The important thing, for clarity, is to recognize that I-Self and O-Self coexist, always; that internal and external are equally real, equally inextricable. This is only common sense, after all. There is no use defining out of existence either inner world or outer. Given that they are the same thing experienced differently, how could you?

And that’s enough for the moment.

Our thanks as always. Till next time.