Friday, October 25, 2019
4:10 a.m. Noticeably better night, last night. I think this course of Prednisone is working. It would be nice not to have to put up with the usual all winter.
I will be interested to see how you proceed with “experience and perception are both 3D and non-3D,” unless you have other plans.
4:35 a.m. Just had one of those “Aha!” moments, lying in bed resting while waiting for the coffee. The premise of “Person of Interest” is backwards. A true super-intelligence wouldn’t choose measures, but men. It would know men’s hearts, and delegate accordingly. But as I try to write this, I see I have lost it, or nearly. And I get the sense that in fact it connects to our larger theme. Let’s find out.
So, friends, let’s begin.
[Pause]
I am surprised that so far, only nothing. That usually happens only when I don’t have an idea where we will go, or should go. It is as if I am the gearshift and have not taken it out of neutral. But in this case there is a different sense of it, an easeful rest, as if saying “No need to be up now, you can do this later.” O treacherous voice, I doubt it. [And what a lot of second-hand memories I have, taken from a lifetime’s incessant reading. I think of young Churchill, being taught Latin. His teacher explains some Latin case (I may not have the detail right) that one uses when addressing inanimate objects, and uses, as example, saying “O table!” and Churchill blurts out, “But I never do,” and is informed that impertinence will be severely punished. Why that memory – if it may be called a memory, when it is actually a memory of something read, not something experienced – should remain, God knows.]
But you see, this provides us a handle to proceed. Or, equally, you could say we, in seeding you that association of ideas, provided the nudge that moved the gearshift. The idea works either way.
You have memories made of books read, movies watched, stories others have told you out of their own lives that have moved you for some reason. Can any of these be said to be any less real than the memories of streets you have driven, meals you have eaten, activities you have engaged in?
I’m getting, it is the emotional strength of a thing that is important. Or, not quite that, but in that direction.
You wrote a small poem once about people being the important thing in life, all else being furniture.
But that was true in senses I didn’t realize, wasn’t it?
It is a long complicated association of ideas, probably impossible to convey at all, save in bullet points, there are so many things to be connected.
I sure hope you have them. I could feel a sense of the sequence but no way could I trace it.
You will find it easier, as always, to preserve your intent, trust, and proceed. So:
- Fictional characters live within those who connect with them.
- Second-hand memories are as real as first-hand.
- People’s impact on one’s life varies by emotional intensity.
- With people, as with events, what manifests externally manifests internally.
- Another way to say that: People, like events, impact your life as you have receptors for them.
- You must, if you are to advance your understanding, root out this idea that chance and coincidence (which do exist) amount to meaninglessness (which does not exist).
- So what is your life? Accumulation of things? Of events? Of interactions with others? Of chains of thought?
Don’t cherry-pick what is important in our lives, in other words.
Well, that is one piece of it.
- Remember: Love, be helpful, be your true self – all of these, as best you can. Why?
Why? Because that is how to be authentic, I take it. That is how to be our true selves.
Yes, your true greater selves, not your partial and illusory selves. That is the point here. That is what religious practice, philosophical understanding, character-building exercises, self-development courses are all aimed at. To the degree that they aim at anything else, they err.
- Your true selves are formed in 3D and non-3D, always and inevitably. This is not the same as saying that you are aware of it.
- Therefore the events of your lives are experienced (and are shaped) in 3D and non-3D, always and inevitably.
- Therefore your world is not one inner world and one outer world, as appears, but one undivided and indivisible world, as has been described repeatedly though incompletely.
- Therefore the division into “real v. imaginary” is as illusory as that between “physical v. spiritual” or “physical v. mental.” It is all one thing.
- Still, as you know, it is perceived differently because you live (in effect) straddling two worlds with different rules, the 3D and the non-3D.
- This is how Horatio Hornblower can be as real as George Washington, and Shangri-La as real as 20th-century Peking.
- You don’t live in a dream; you don’t, quite, live a dream, but, something like that.
Nor, I get, is our idea of what a dream is, very accurate.
Nor therefore is your idea of what life is, very accurate.
“Who looks outward, dreams; who looks inward, awakens.”
Sometimes. But of course Jung meant, implicitly, that the one looking inward would perforce be balancing a looking-outward that everyday 3D life would assure. He did not mean one could or should exchange living in the 3D world for the non-3D world, nor, closer to the point, that one should downplay or ignore either.
This is all so satisfying, sometimes!
Yes, and all your memories that you write down, and the course of events themselves (that is, how these conversations proceed) are second-hand for all who read them. Are they any the less real for that? Is a history of the American Revolution any less real for having been written by someone else, at another time, out of a different understanding?
Hmm, the larger point?
Each will read into it (thinking they are pulling out of), that which is real to them, as with all the rest of their lives.
That which resonates.
Yes, only not merely at a 3D level of understanding, or you would never be surprised by what happens to you.
Just fascinating. We – which of course means you – should have thought of that bullet-point strategy long ago.
Yes, if we – which of course means you – had thought of it earlier, perhaps we might have gone farther, faster. Must be chance, coincidence, meaningless, that we did not.
Smiling. Our thanks as always.