Making sense of the world

Wednesday, October 9, 2019

4:20 a.m. Not sure I’m up for a full session, but let’s see. Guys?

You can always take a day off.

I know, but I’m up.

And you can’t think of other things you would rather do.

Well, I can’t.

Fine with us. Let’s keep talking about the celestial kingdom that is half the human environment, or inheritance. What is fundamental and cannot be omitted if you are to understand the true nature of the world is that the world is not energy, so much as it is thought. Thus we had you summarize Paul Brunton’s conclusions for those who will never read the original. After all, no one’s conclusions are important to everyone, only to some; this, regardless of the quality of the thought, for people differ so much that there is only so much one can do that spans the gaps among them.

Did I get that right? I drifted, as I wrote.

Close enough to make no important difference.

Why was I thinking of Walter Rathenau?

Via John F. Kennedy, the analogy of nations in mourning.

Yes, but what led me there while in the front of my mind we are talking about the differences in people? Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter.

No, because not everything that might be of interest is important to a theme. What is thinking, after all, but a narrowing, a focusing, of concentration, a ruthless rejection of anything that seems inessential or not connected to the chosen focus.

Although our preferred mode seems to be closer to an all-inclusive casting of our net.

The winnowing-out usually occurs mostly below the level of consciousness, but it does occur. If it did not, continuity would be impossible, and you would be liable to wind up in an insane asylum.

I thought that’s where I am already.

Very funny. Remember, no matter where you are, things can always get worse.

You can always get sold down the river.

Precisely. At any rate –

I know. It has the feel of you, or I, wanting to avoid what we at the same time do want to address. It happens every so often.

Nothing to worry about. Righteous persistence doesn’t mean unwavering or even continual, it means, getting back on the horse.

Good thing, too. Okay, back to the celestial kingdom and us.

Various detours and reiterations and overlappings of analogy have been used to keep reminding you that the world is not solid but ethereal. It is not matter, but nor is it energy (which is matter); it is something that precedes matter/energy. Brunton provided you a way to understand that the world is thought into existence, continually, and that it cannot be thought into existence by any one individual or group of individuals, nor even by everything taken as a whole, but necessarily must be by something greater than the whole.

That is so clear to me now, and still hard to explain convincingly.

Nor is there any need to. Sparks, remember, not chains.

Now, if the world is made of thought (which, of course, is not quite the right word, but will have to do), it follows that the world as it appears, in all its apparent solidity, in all its apparent reality, cannot be what it seems.

No, that isn’t quite the right way to say what you mean. I sort of snatched at that word “seems” to end the sentence. Again?

The world is what everyone knows it is, yet at the same time, what that “knows it is” really is, is not by any means commonly agreed upon.

Not much better, but let’s struggle on.

Take your present political situation, which means, really, your present social situation.

Spinning out of control.

Yes, invoking fears of civil war, more assassinations, conversion of institutional rule to rule by force majeure.

Which is why I was thinking of Walter Rathenau?

It is never out of your – what shall we call it? – your unconscious consciousness. Your background music. Your lifelong continuing thread of mental connections. You take what you learn, whether it is Germany in the 1920s or America in the 1960s, and you process the data – more or less automatically – to continually refine your picture.

This without any new data beyond the 1990s, say.

No, without any systematic attempt to ingest and digest such data. You still live in this society, even if you do not participate in its rituals of seeing the world through the same filers moment by moment. You use a different continuing thread to remain oriented.

Is that what the news cycles are? Ways for people to tell themselves a story?

That isn’t quite what we mean, nor what we said. It is more like this: In order to make sense of the world (that is, of reality), the human brain is designed to function as a huge reducing valve, excluding vastly more than it ever includes, from sheer necessity. However, no two people’s resulting input is just the same. There are significant overlaps, but never identity between or among them. And no one’s picture is or ever could be identical to the actual big picture. It is, simply put, too big a fish for anyone’s net.

Now, it is true that you in 3D are part of larger beings that extend laterally in 3D as well as in non-3D. That is, you are larger, longer (so to speak) beings in space and time – and outside of space and time – than you can experience yourselves to be. (You may conceive of it; you may get a sense of it, but you cannot actually live it. it would be like any one rivet trying to realize itself as a part of a bridge or a building or even of a boiler. It’s a matter of scale and of one’s place in the scheme of things.)

The world (and by this, again, we mean not only planet Earth, but 3D reality) is larger than individuals, then humanity as a whole, than all the four kingdoms we have sketched, than the entire natural composition of the 3D, to include all the galaxies and all the smallest energy swirls. It has its own independent existence. It is not a figment nor a creation of anyone’s imagination. That ought to be obvious, though it may be lost sight of in philosophical flights of abstraction. But that is not the end of the story. The world is not your thought, but it is thought, or shall we say it is the stuff that thoughts are made of.

You in your 3D identities make sense of the continual bombardment of data as best you can, and no two of you put it together exactly the same way, because no two of you ever have exactly the same pieces. But you do put it together, and any given culture may be defined as a tent thrown up to include certain rules of thumb and exclude others. Thus different cultures live to greater or less extent in different worlds. And as above, so below. Within cultures are subcultures, each of which gathers around certain shared perceptions and (thus) values and ideals and assumptions. And each of these subdivide in turn, of course.

And when each subculture acquires its own echo-chamber –

Precisely. Different news sources embodying different assumptions are going to produce different self-reinforcing pictures of the world, even if they attempt to be fair and impartial, because what is self-evidently true to one is damnable falsehood to another.

And both may be right at the same time.

Yes, but good luck bringing many people to understand that. It will seem an obvious contradiction in terms.

Don’t I know it. But we have strayed a long way from where I thought we were going today.

From where we thought we were going today, too. But, nothing lost.

I know. Righteous persistence. Okay, thanks and till next time.