Friday March 17, 2005
Okay, let’s talk about organization-intelligences, Katrina. I wouldn’t want us to forget the subject. I have an idea where you are going, of course.
You do – because of course if we share access to your mind, you share access to ours. It is inevitable. The reason it may not appear so is merely your thought-structures (rendering the possibility invisible to you) and your lack of practice in discerning. As you clear away your assumptions – your thought-structures – and as you practice careful discernment, you learn how much more is available to you.
All right, organization-intelligences. When I finish explaining, perhaps we can find a less cumbersome term, for the act of explaining and your act of mental assimilation may suggest a more convenient shortcut – which is what words are, after all.
You know that Plato talked of archetypes; you know that Jung talked of archetypes. (Plato called them ideas; in your time you call them Platonic ideas, and treat them as little more than fancy.) You have not done the thinking that would make these real to you. Or, it is not so much thinking that is required, as seeing from a different set of assumptions.
Absolutely required is that you begin by thinking not that the physical world is primary, but the underlying world. And here at the beginning is a problem, for your minds cast about, asking “what can be more primary than material?” And the word you choose to use immediately and silently colors your further perceptions. If one says “energy” and another says “spirit” they will be seeing different things within seconds, if indeed their choice of words does not indicate a difference they brought into the discussion.
But to minimize the hijacking-by-labels that must occur, let us call the world that underlies physical reality merely, the underlying world. Not the underworld. Not even “the other side” though in some ways that is pretty neutral. Not “other vibrations” for reasons of nuance that I won’t go into. None to these – nor several others that might be retrieved or coined – is wrong; all are incomplete and cannot be otherwise. So – the underlying world.
Now, this non-physical world, without space and time, is nonetheless organized. It is not shapeless for lack of space any more than it is shapeless for lack of time. It organizes around concepts – around ideas – around functioning units. These three things sound very different to you, but they are three ways of partially describing the same reality. Relative to the physical world[1], the underlying world may be regarded as organizing itself in a sort of dance with the physical. Just as you create a soul by physical action interacting with non-physical force – spirit – so you create – what should we call them? Shadow-images, is how they would appear to you – when you in one way or another assemble something in the physical.
Build a car?
Create an artwork?
Form a relationship?
Fall into a habit?
Create or restructure an organization?
Rework an idea?
Conceive a child?
Write a computer program?
These seem to you very different activities, and so they are – but they have in common that each of them spontaneously organizes on “this side” a sort of holographic blueprint, a soul, in a sense. These souls are not to be compared to human souls, because the human is half-divine, or perhaps we should say humans are creations of the divine, expressing and containing the divine within them in that special way I spoke of earlier. It is true that ultimately all is part of the divine because it could not be otherwise – but there is “part of” and there is “part of.” The soul of a painting is a true soul, it is the non-physical organization of a physical thing, and it is divine in that everything is divine – but it is not of the same substance as what we might call the human divine.
It is very difficult to convey the quite simple distinction because people will not resist the temptation to respond to the associations words suggest, and immediately they get to arguing with what is said rather than absorbing it, mulling it, and seeing what does or does not resonate rather than what can or can not be fitted or forced into some logical system.
Quite a simple distinction, really. Two kinds of beings – humans and everything else. Humans were created to transcend and change; everything else was created to express and maintain certain qualities. As in the physical, so in the non-physical. Thus we may say truly that your car has a soul, and your cat, and even your desk or pen – but this is not to compare them to the human soul that you are, for they are not comparable except by contrast.
[1] my italics, but approved, I felt, as I typed.