TGU — Searching for a metaphor

Wednesday, June 13, 2018

4:30 a.m. Very well, guys, a sus ordenes. You said we would begin with the statement that the vast impersonal and personal forces share the same nature and quality. As the Daleks would say in Dr. Who: Explain.

This is an example of the same thing experienced differently. Thus it looks like two and not one. Or, it is two different things sharing the same characteristics. The two ways of looking at it make an ambiguous situation artificially clear, but only misleadingly so.

Like our thinking that you in non-3D are either one being, subdivided, or many beings, intensely interconnected.

Yes, same thing. It is a characteristic of mind functioning under 3D conditions that things seem to be either/or, easier than both/and or neither/nor. Two-value logic corresponds to the overall condition of duality, while four-value logic blurs the distinctions and seems like fuzzy thinking until one’s level of perception and understanding rises to a level able to comprehend that not only the thing under examination at the moment, but all life in 3D, transcends dualistic logic.

Quite a sentence, but I hope it will be clear enough. We’ll keep it in mind as we go.

Actually, probably you won’t be able to keep it in mind except sporadically. The habits of 3D perception are very strong. But as long as you are able to periodically recoup your understanding, to recast what you have come to, and say, “Except, it isn’t only this way,” no harm done.

Ultimately, the forces we are to discuss are not separate from you whom they affect. “All is one.” But the uselessness of that true statement for the purpose of analysis ought to be obvious. A clock is its gears and its hands and its dial and its cabinetry – it is also the people who depend upon it, and it is the movement through time that it measures, and it is time itself. All is one; everything is separate. Both sort of true, from a 3D perspective. Neither the whole story, from within 3D. [That’s what I wrote, “from within 3D.” Surely it should have been “from beyond 3D”?] It is just a condition of your 3D existence, one that can be sensed by you only because you extend beyond 3D as well. To the degree that you remain within the 3D trance, life is either/or. To the degree that you transcend it, life is all one, either/or, both/and. It is the fact that you exist in All-D, not merely in 3D, that allows you as fish to perceive the water and the fishbowl.

So, within these limitations –

Describing the forces as the weather around you is a productive analogy, but also one that exaggerates the distinction between them and yourselves. At some point we will have to discard this scaffolding too. But let us employ it for the moment, remembering that it is a provisional aid to the understanding, and not a description set in stone as an absolute.

You as created beings – as knots in the fabric, to refer to a different analogy – represent complex structures with their own inertia.

No, that isn’t going to work very well, I don’t think. I get where you are going, but the analogy won’t work.

We recognize the difficulty, but let’s try simple inadequate models and work our way toward more complex suggestive ones.

Okay. We’ll fumble toward it.

That’s what we are always doing, because the description process is a groping toward a common understanding between two beings in very different conditions. It is you and we each grasping a huge beach ball in the dark, attempting to walk with it while not stumbling over the uneven ground, not able to tell very well where the other’s grasp is, how firm, what the next step will do to the delicate balance – you get the idea. It isn’t a hazardous process, but it is somewhat unpredictable, haphazard, even.

If we think of you in 3D as sailing ships, each rigged differently and each with different origins and distinctions, you could see that the same winds and tides will hit each ship with different effect and will be used differently. But – as you already said – this is an inadequate metaphor. So let us seek a more complex one.

Suppose yourselves each an electronic chip. The same electric current running through each will produce very different effects, not because of a difference in the current – there won’t be any difference in this simplified example – but because each chip consists of different units combined in a way that will produce a certain effect and not others. Thus, the current is motivator, the chips are animated but not defined by it. This is a better analogy than ships and wind, but still far from adequate, so let’s build on the understanding.

Now suppose, instead, that each of you in 3D is a physical unit only; that is, let us consider only your 3D

This isn’t going to work.

No, it isn’t. You and we reached that understanding at the same time, no surprise. Well, try, try again. We are searching now for an analogy that will show how the being is affected by – and also affects – the forces that move it. Not a ship being pushed by wind and tide, though its miniscule resistance might be said to affect those forces. Not an electronic chip being animated by an electric current, though again its resistance might be seen as modifying the current. We need something much more interactive, though still a matter of great disparity of forces. We need to bring will into it, you see, which implies perception and judgment.

Something less automatic than an electronic circuit no matter how variable its result.

Something more organic, more willful.

Or, how about a prism?

That is an advance in one way, in that it demonstrates the acted-upon as being also the transformer, but it lacks the element of will. A prism will affect the light passing through it according to its own nature, and in that it is a good model of the relationship we seek to illustrate – but its nature does not change according to its decisions, its circumstances. You do, and that is the point of 3D existence.

Well, what about decision-circuits employing light rather than electricity? Logic-gates shunt the light into this prism or that, and in effect the same input is continually changed as it shines through and the logic-gates vary their positions.

Yes, in some ways that is pretty good. You may wish to define logic-gates for people who do not deal with computer logic.

A logic-gate – it’s probably called something else, but that’s how I think of it – is a decision-point in the flow. Input entering the gate will go right if the switch is set one way, left if set the other way. A simple binary choice, but put a million of them in sequence and you’ve got a complicated, seemingly infinite set of paths possible.

If you take your 3D life to be a run through this amazingly long sequence of logic-gates, you can get a sense of how your lives are continuous choice. But the analogy does not allow for any but choices pre-planned by the designer of the sequence, nor does it provide for a modification of the motivating force by decisions during the sequence. So, better to revert to the use of logic-gates to choose among prisms – remembering that the analogy is still necessarily inadequate.

Ideally, we will find an analogy or an image that will show the rats changing the maze even as they are running through it, but that may take some doing!

Meanwhile, enough for today.

Okay, well, our thanks as always. It’s interesting to help clumsy the beach-ball along. See you next time.

 

5 thoughts on “TGU — Searching for a metaphor

  1. The weather analogy has worked for me because I remember weather as Seth talked about it–“The inner state of each individual mind is projected outward. The inner state causes chemical changes in the physical body. Chemicals are thrown outward into the atmosphere. Hormones are released of particular varieties. Very definite and unique electrical change occur in the skin, which change on a mass level the atmosphere at any given unit.

    “All of these conditions merge to create the peculiar weather with its innumerable and constant changes. These exterior conditions then affect the individual physical structures and individuals react to the peculiar conditions which they themselves have created” (from Mass Events and Personal Reality).

    But maybe that doesn’t hold up as well here with vast impersonal forces–“interactive, though still a matter of great disparity of forces.” Any thoughts?

    1. I wasn’t aware of Seth’s thoughts on it: Maybe that’s a reason why I am still unable to bring myself to read that book, though I started it again a few months ago, then put it down. We’ll just have to see what the guys have in mind, I guess.

  2. At TMI last year I got ‘pachinko’ – a 2D example with decision points represented by the metal pins and the outcome represented by the balls across the bottom if they’d been allowed to collect. Later either that day or week I was put to consider this in 3D, a series of points, with whatever it was flowing in between. And then I was given to consider this concept, but what it would act like if the form, rather than the point structure, were focused upon.

    And then I got murmuration – from the outside, it has the appearance of a single structure, very beautiful in its changeability. From the inside, each of the individual birds are making decisions based on – what…maybe their approximate distance and actions of their nearest neighbors . . . (and I’ve read that their neural processing is slower than the reaction itself), but also the prevailing wind, thermals, gravity, other birds, etc., etc.

    I’ve been puzzling on those ideas ever since I got them. It’s a relief to having something to apply them to!

  3. On re-reading this, I thought about the analogy to blood. Blood flows through us, is one of the things that animates us, and we change it through our habits–what we eat, drink, smoke, etc.). It’s a picture of a closed system (from 3D perspective), but its interactive and maybe gets at the disparity between one force and another. It includes will–“perception and judgment.” Breath might work, too.
    I remember first seeing the blood drawn from an alcoholic. It was thick, almost gelatinous, vs. the more free-flowing blood drawn from a healthier person. Blood brings its own elements of oxygen and nutrients, but it also contains elements that come from interaction with us.
    Just a thought! I don’t know how far down the road it would hold up, but it was fun to think about.

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