TGU on passion and the vast impersonal forces

Tuesday June 12, 2018

3 a.m. A starting-point for today came to me last night, but I thought, rather than getting up to make a note of it, why not merely trust that you will remember it? So, I hope you do.

And why not? It tied human behavior to the forces around you (us).

I can feel you stalling! But BTW I meant to ask anyway, the other day you referred to “we” humans, and I noticed but didn’t comment. I take it that was you slipping in a further redefinition.

Drawing a connection that is not necessarily obvious, let’s say. There is still a tendency to think of non-3D elements as separate from 3D individuals. It may be time to remind people that this is not so, that “we and you” is often “we and we”; that is, that sometimes what those in 3D may think of as non-3D individuals are actually extensions of those 3D individuals into non-3D, then experienced as if separate. This is not new information; it is a reminder. Some of the guidance that people experience is another part of themselves. Some is not, but some is. That is worth realizing and remembering.

Okay, so what occurred to me last night was – ?

You continue to read novels and see films – that is, dramas – and of course they involve passions. What is a villain but a person in the grip of a hot or cold passion? Some are personifications of such drives – that is, their whole lives are driven by greed or hatred or by indifference or whatever. Others are a mixture of traits and characteristics and only occasionally – perhaps even uniquely, on one fatal occasion – explode into action, or coldly execute some scheme. We emphasize hot or cold, you see, because this is not necessarily a matter of a lapse, nor of a thorough-going rottenness. It could be either; it could be any shade between. But no matter how it expresses, it is a passion motivating a personality.

I’m getting that you want to make a distinction in our thinking that often we don’t make. I can’t quite express it, but you haven’t, either.

Passion is not always emotional. There can be a cold passion, just as deadly, just as icily indifferent to suffering. The evil done by the Himmlers of the world is quite as deadly as that done in a rage – as Goering, say – or by calculation – Goebbels, say – or by someone possessed by a demon, like Hitler. Nor, we hasten to add, is this a political statement, as if evil existed on the right and not also the left. But the personalities and consequences of the Nazis we cited are well known. Those of Stalin and Mao tse-tung are less so, and in any case we would hope that those who are following this line of exposition would be beyond capture by ideology by this point.

You are citing Himmler as a mild-mannered clerk, like Eichmann; Goering as an impulsive, passionate driving force; Goebbels as all intellect and no morality or even decency; Hitler as a man swallowed by his hatred and resentments and his all-consuming will to have his way, less out of egotism than out of delusions of grandeur.

That’s right. What metaphysical scheme to explain the world is any good to you that does not explain the fact of the existence of such men? (And women, of course. This is not a politically correct statement in any respect. One would have to be feeble-minded or blinded by ideology to think that evil or good or any characteristic was contained only in one gender, or race, or nationality, or set of opinions.)

But now let us connect some dots that may be carried in separate mental buckets. On the one hand, the existence of forces that run through human lives; on the other, the timing of the release of such forces.

Now, I know that was sloppy [that is, sloppily expressed], but at least we got the suggestion of what you mean to explore with us. Should I try to set it out more carefully, or do you want to continue?

Bullet-points, perhaps.

All right. It’s more than just “on the one hand on the other hand.” It is a correlating of things we don’t usually think of together.

• We as individuals are communities of threads, as has been explained.

• In a sense, our character is something like a ratio among these threads.

• Our decisions over a lifetime strengthen some elements and weaken others. That’s what recurrent free choice does; that’s what free will in 3D conditions is all about.

• But our actions are not taken in a vacuum. Our life situations are defined not only by our inner drives but by external situations. We respond to externals in our individual manner, but we do not shape those externals.

• The manifestation of such externals is not random, but is not under human 3D control. It may be compared to the weather, an external force to which we adapt.

• That weather has its timing, and as was said, it may be mapped by astrology. The psychic influences of any given moment are to be seen in the stars, so to speak, for those who learn to read them.

 

Yes, good. And the interconnection between the individual as it has shaped itself by its decisions, beginning from its initial condition when it was inserted into 3D, and the weather at any given moment, is the passions. At least, that is one way of saying it.

On the one hand, who we are; on the other hand, what we have to contend with at any given moment.

Close enough.

All right.

Well, you see – or apparently you do not yet quite see – this is the piece missing from many a model of human behavior.

No, I don’t yet see just what you’re driving at.

Humans are not of a piece; they are often self-contradictory; they change over time; they sometimes behave in unpredictable ways; sometimes they “aren’t themselves.” You have come to see that this is because they are communities acting as individuals. Well and good. But the next step is to ask yourself, how and why and even when do humans manifest various characteristics?

People are not puppets; they do have free will, and they exercise it to varying degrees in different circumstances and in different parts of their lives. Nonetheless humans as groups are quite predictable and are often quite easily manipulated. How are the two equally true statements to be reconciled?

Mostly people don’t reconcile them. They choose sides.

So they do, but they would be better advised to delve deeper if they wish to understand. Life contains all contradictions, as we have often said, but does not contradict itself.

Since I don’t think you are about to say that human action is a matter of statistics, nor of predestination nor of chance, I will be interested to see what you will say. I get that it is a matter of the interaction of our inner lives with the vast impersonal forces sweeping through our outer lives but it hasn’t yet clicked. Need the right image, I imagine.

Your statement is not quite correct. It isn’t flat wrong, but it is misleading as stated. The vast impersonal forces do not sweep through your outer lives, because there is no such division, and if there were it would be the inner and not the outer which is primary. The vast impersonal forces are of the same nature and quality as the vast personal forces, and that will take some explaining. As we have been at this an hour, let us pause here and continue from this point. Thus, there is your next starting place.

That always helps. Very well, our thanks as always. Till next time.