TGU – the process of sketching reality

Tuesday, April 24, 2018

4:40 a.m. So, my friends, let’s get back to your latest discussion. My note to myself last night says All-D, weather, the vast impersonal forces, sin, soul development, third-tier experience. Something in all that ought to help us get back the scent.

We smile. We aren’t the ones needing reminders. But, always good for you – for anybody doing this kind of thing – to do something to orient themselves in advance. It saves time casting about.

We do realize that there is a natural tendency to wish for a logical structure, a pattern of development, an implied table of contents, and you in turn will do well to remember that logical progression is not always necessary, not always even helpful, sometimes unnecessarily constrictive, because the real work of connecting dots is going to go on individually, and every individual mind is, has been, and will be, shaped by different associations. A summary needs logic, to enable concise statement of relationships among elements previously spelled out. But the exploration of new territory does not require this and, as we say, may be inhibited by it on occasion. You don’t want logic to constrain association of new material with what already exists; you want it to help you organize the new perceptions that arise after your perceptions have been shaken up by the new perspectives that have come to light.

So it is somewhat like the reciprocating action between perception and analysis.

Yes it is. It is ingestion and assimilation, alternating. That’s a good way to think of it. Just as life is cyclical, so is it reciprocating. Nothing is a straight line.

Again, hold in mind the expansion of scale we are attempting to facilitate. Your 3D awareness lives in a world that is actually larger than 3D; and you are larger than 3D. The All-D person in an All-D world is the first element, and that All-D person will be aware of itself as an All-D (rather than 3D only) being, either entirely or not at all, or anywhere in between. Thus (as we keep saying) the need for religions and art that speak the same truths adapted to many different levels of development; thus, the need for symbols rather than strict, logical bits of data. Seen in this light, science, fact, careful logical statement stripped of connotation, are very limited very precise snapshots of any one given layer of development – often, even usually, not recognized as being a special case, but instead thought of as if universal. But the science of Einstein or Tesla is not that of reductionists or technicians.

You just said, I think, that the scientific method of experiencing the world is a tool that may have value, but cannot possibly be universal.

Cannot be universal to the extent that it values precision over symbol, for within the symbol is contained layer after layer of connective tissue.

Connective “tissue” is right? Doesn’t feel right.

No, more like “connective possibilities,” connective anchors. What we are saying is, you need to be at one particular level of development to connect with the scientific method of seeing the world. But symbolic representation offers a hook for those who are at any level, both below and above that of the explanation of the world by examination of its parts.

Is this what Henry Adams was getting at in his discussion of the virgin and the dynamo?

Let’s leave what Henry Adams meant for those who are interested. His thought was both the product of, and was addressed to, minds at the bridge of the new 20th century. It is nearly a foreign language to your readers, and getting to be that for you who came so much sooner afterwards. But, you see, there is a tension between precision and allusion, between logic and association. Specialized tools perform their own task well and other tasks not so well.

So, you as All-D creatures, considered only within this All-D context, and not yet within the larger context of the larger beings you are products of, part of: You are mysteries to yourselves because wherever you focus the microscope, there is all the rest of you, and at best you can remember it, but not, quite, realize it. That is, you can’t until you learn to do so, and that is one aspect of your 3D existence, learning to experience who you are, in and of yourselves, without reference to other parts of the larger being, without reference to “others” in the 3D world, without reference (for a while) to what seem to be external unconnected factors like events, coincidences, fate, etc.

Then, the world you live in, the 3D world that reveals itself to be so much more than it first appears to be. And the more carefully you look at it, the more you learn about yourselves, [whether you] realize it at first or not. This is one reason why it doesn’t really matter how one approaches life. All roads lead to Rome. Begin as a materialist and you wind up seeing through matter to energy, then to what is behind and beneath (and in front of and above) energy. Begin as a mystic concentrating on the unity of all things, and sooner or later you stumble on a stone, or somebody dents your car, or you get hungry and you don’t have a piece of bread in the house. You know what we’re saying here, and notice how saying something metaphorically is so much more connotation-rich, offers so much more possibility for entrance.

The world around you – the people, the things – is alive and has its own reality, its own purpose, quite apart from you. But equally, that world of people and things exists in reference to you; one might say for you. Both contradictory statements true, because the contradiction inheres not in the situation but in one’s view of the situation. One person lives in a world of luck, of chance, of contingency; another lives in a world of design and intricate connection. Same world.

Life in the world — life

Hard for you to get a handle on so many elements at the same time, I get that.

Yes. We need to find a way to help you remember, at the same time, that the person we describe has many levels, mostly unremembered at any given time until quite a process of development has been accomplished; and that the external events the person lives among are in fact truly external (that is, independent of the person’s own development) and at the same time truly only an extension of the internal (that is, the world one can be aware of can only be that for which one has receptors), and that this understanding is only the beginning of the basis for understanding what is itself only the beginning of an explanation of the larger stage we live on.

I think I mostly followed that. But it’s pretty vague still.

That’s what we’re pointing out. We are sketching a very complex initial glimpse of a way of seeing things. It can’t be precise (and, indeed, must not try to be, if it is to have a chance of succeeding) and it can’t be even in focus, not yet, or it will be a false precision, a too-constricted focus or, let’s say, field of view.

So, there is the person, there is the person’s life as experienced. But what shapes the external world that the individual does and does not perceive? The world is not merely a blank chalkboard to be written upon, though it is that among other things. It is not a full-blown picture into which the person must fit as best s/he can, though it is that too. And neither is it a compromise between the two, nor a mixture of those elements. These ways of seeing it are products of an individual’s sense of the world as seen from a certain point of view, one’s own. There is no possibility of coming to a universal point of view – an “objective fact” – from the partial view one necessarily embodies. But once you realize that, you realize that you are trying to turn a screw using a hammer. The proper task is not the impossible search for a universally applicable view of the world, but for the most inclusive, most subtle, most sophisticated view of the world that you can come up with, because you are the specialized observer sent to spy out the terrain. Or, to switch metaphors, there’s no use wishing you were a pure while light combining all colors when you were created to be a filter creating – diffracting – the color blue, say, or 30 shades of red.

Your point of view is unique. It can’t help being unique. But you may increase its depth and subtlety or not, as you will (and as your limits allow).

And we can resume with a discussion of the objective reality of the weather you live among when we resume. In other words, we’ll look at the world as it struggles along without “precious irreplaceable you.”

A nod to Travis McGee. Okay, well thanks for all this, and we’ll see you next time.