Individuals and society

Monday, December 17, 2018

4:10 a.m. Let’s talk about diffusion of ways of being. I get that this is where you want to continue going.

It is one entry into the larger subject. And perhaps our views on society will spark other trains of association.

In you? In us?

A distinction without a difference. Although you believe what we say, and think (now) as we do, mostly, still you don’t instinctively visualize reality so instinctively that necessary conclusions present themselves automatically. That is, you and we are – as we have been telling you from the beginning – the same things, on different turf. You know that you are “spirits and also animals,” or, as we would prefer to put it, 3D with a non-3D component. You know or have been told that there is one reality, not two, and that therefore 3D and non-3D are themselves one thing, not two, and the differences between them are differences in emphasis rather than differences in kind. Knowing all this, how can you ask, us or them? If it had been entirely internalized, you wouldn’t be able to.

All right, I see that.

You do and yet you do not. You still envision this as “my thoughts” and “their thoughts”; me talking to TGU. That isn’t untrue, but it isn’t undistorted, either. Call it a halfway-house concept, useful to allow yourselves to get comfortable in a new place, so that further changes may be accommodated with minimal discomfort.

Now, this is not said in a spirit of criticism, but of enlightenment. (No, we don’t mean that with a capital “E”.) You have to understand what is going on around you and within you, if you are to function – and in context, that means, if you are to not freeze up; if you are to remain open to further revolutions in your conception of the nature of things. The TGU concept, the renaming of spirit and matter as non-3D and 3D, the progressive emphasis on the fact that the world is all one thing – halfway-house concepts all, designed to loosen the hold of older dualisms and allow a new, roomier conception of life to suggest itself.

So, one more time: As above, so below. What you see around you, what you see within you – generalize. Don’t think to understand them only in isolation.

I get the sense of how you want me to boil down 20 years’ worth of transmissions and conversations, here.

Well, if you think of all this as your own thought, doesn’t it free you somewhat? And if you also think of you as being far more than 3D-only-you, doesn’t that also free you somewhat?

Again, that’s how I think, but apparently only how I think, not how I instinctively feel.

It’s just a matter of overcoming old habits and establishing new ones. As we said earlier, this change may happen all at once but is more likely to happen a bit at a time, in which case it will better preserve continuity, and so will minimize the disruption that accompanies revolutions in thought.

So – to cut this short somewhat, lest your fatigue overcome you – a few words on how societies change by way of associations of individuals. You will find our thoughts obvious truisms, or revolutionary firebrands in the powder keg, depending upon how deeply you allow them to sink in. For they are the very essence of revolution.

You know [philosopher Thomas] Hobbes: “The life of man without society would be solitary, nasty, brutish and short.” That isn’t wrong, only he might have said, more simply, it would be an impossible hypothesis. Nobody lives or could live a solitary life except relatively. We have stressed this point more than once. Thoreau wasn’t born Thoreau, but became himself by growing up in his family, amid his neighbors, in a society found ready-made and functioning. The hermit in the desert, the John James Audubon living in enchantment in the wilderness, the mountain men in the Rocky Mountains in the 1800s – multiply your examples how you will, you will never find anyone who brought himself into the world, nurtured and raised himself, taught himself how to survive and thrive. How could it be? Even Romulus and Remus had to be suckled by the wolf!

Oh, I get it. Individualism as it has seized America’s political and ideological imagination is a fantasy, useful primarily for countering the equally erroneous collectivist fantasy that thinks mammals could or would live as insects do.

If you will pursue the subject, you will see that the same impossibilities that attach to the idea of an individual sprung up alone and living alone apply equally to families. Even tribes, which are as close to the idea as is possible, do not and cannot live in isolation without severe deterioration over time, like the remnants found in tropical areas of primitive peoples. They are primitive not because they never rose, but because their isolation in their environment pressed them to deteriorate. Rather than being pristine societies, they are what is left when a group is forced to survive in isolation. You say “The environment was too harsh for them,” but really, if you knew it, the isolation was too harsh for them. It made their existence too simple.

We need to take a moment to clarify. In speaking of primitive peoples, we do not refer to their level of technology, nor of their views of reality (that is, their religious beliefs). Native societies may live quite simply, quite well adapted to their environment, without ever discovering the wheel or employing mathematics or learning to read and write. Such things are not a true measure of a society’s level of being. Or, let us say, such things do not measure what we value here, which is, greater connection, greater consciousness, closer integration into the whole. Life’s goal is not to have all of its children wear suit and tie, read newspapers, and commute to work! But neither is life indifferent to development.

We remind you, from our point of view, any “either/or” is likely to be only provisionally true. Choices exist within a polarity, and in a dualistic world, all choices are valid (though you may or may not like the consequences of a given choice). So, a life lived in a tiny isolated band in the rainforest does not automatically have a good or bad rating, so to speak. It is neither “noble savages” nor “ignorant bushmen.” Each case is different, and what life gets from the reports filed from such existences cannot be predicted. So, understand, we are not saying “Civilization is good, primitive life is bad,” nor even “Civilization is convenient, or advantageous, etc. and primitive life is not.” The distinction we are drawing is between isolation and life in a greater community. What is true of individual men and women is equally true of families and tribes and clans and nations.

I’m not sure of your bottom line, here.

Life is a process of expansion and contraction. Each of these processes follows rules. Therefore they express according to pattern.

And “that’s enough for now.”

Correct.

Okay. Thanks, and see you next time.