Sex and love in 3D and non-3D

Saturday, November 2, 2019

4 a.m. All right, my friends. You said yesterday that you wanted to resume with the question of permanence v. fluctuation. Clearly you have begun to talk about good v. evil in these terms, though quite how is not yet clear to me.

As an overall context, we are using transience v. permanence to show you how different things look when examined in the wrong context, then in the right context. What is permanent is not the same order of things as what is temporary.

I get, spiritual v. temporal.

That is one way these very elementary – therefore, very essential – distinctions have been understood. We have been attempting to reduce the distance that has grown in your minds between the two, because that distance has allowed you, encouraged you, forced you, finally, to ignore one or the other side of reality, leading you ever farther astray. Religious fanaticism and materialist fanaticism both rest in one-eyed vision, Blake’s “single vision.” So we do not speak of material v. spiritual for many reasons, one of which is this dividing tendency. “3D v. non-3D” provides the real distinction without producing the illusory one.

One of the very first things you told me was that the difference between the embodied and the disembodied was primarily one of turf: We are the same things in different conditions.

Yes. Re-knitting the sundered ideas has been an enduring theme. We now apply it to a different class of ideas, and we think you will find it illumines the subject of good and evil in 3D – that is, illumines the nature of life.

So, for instance, we can look at love as a very close-to-the-bone example. Everyone in 3D is shaped by the experience of love and the experience of love’s absence. It is as basic as any element in 3D life.

You started to use not love but sex as an example, the other day.

It is not a matter of one or the other. Like life itself in 3D and non-3D, love and sex illumine each other in their overlap and their contrast, in their cooperation and their antagonism, in their very different but not opposite contexts.

• No one is neutral about love or sex or the two in combination. So, it is a good useful approach.
• It is a mistake to say that sex is strictly of the 3D, just as to say love is strictly of the non-3D.
• Yet, they do function as a sort of polarity. “Polarity” is not the same as “opposite.” It is more like “relative emphasis.”
• Can there be sex without bodies? Well –

Well?

The pause was intended to provide a space for your non-3D mind to insert ideas, insights, intuitions, on the subject, rather than have you read on by, or accept whatever we might say. Your own reactions, Frank?

I get that you are indirectly saying that sex as a phenomenon is not as simple, not as 3D, as we tend to think.

Exactly so.

• Can there be love without bodies?

The impulse is to say yes, immediately and without thought.

That impulse is not wrong, but a little thought on the subject would not be wasted. Ask yourselves, how could love be dependent upon bodies? Bear in mind, we do not here refer to sexual attraction (that’s why we lasted this second rather than first) but love.

• Now consider sex and love in two temporal contexts: 3D and non-3D considered as artifacts or, say, characteristics, as they are revealed by their surroundings.

I am a little lost, so far. I understand the distinctions you are drawing, the separate-but-not-disconnected way you are approaching this, but I don’t know where it is going. Maybe fill in some blanks, instead of leaving it all as rhetorical questions?

Only, they are not rhetorical questions at all. They are very real questions to which we have not yet begun to provide answers, preferring that you all think about the subject first. Or, not “think” in the sense of reasoning; more in the sense of being receptive to insight that may arrive in various ways.

So, you want us to ponder sex and love in 3D and non-3D and see what suggests itself to us.

That is exactly what we want you to do.

What comes to one may not come to another.

Never forget that this work is being done one person at a time, not as one group. It is true., the group-ness is also a part of it (in that shared concentration on a problem will bring shared non-D resources to bear on it), but primarily (from the point of view of any 3D being) it is done one by one.

Finally, while we are posing open questions:

• Can there be “evil? In non-3D? Can there be “good” without “evil”?

You will find these last set of questions much harder to grapple with, if only because you will be tempted to dogmatize. Dogma is well and good as a sort of shorthand codification of a given understanding, but it isn’t much use – except as a point to kick off from – when it comes to thinking something through. So, we suggest, begin with our questions on sex and love in 3D and non-3D. The very fact that the questions won’t quite seem to make sense is an indicator that you will be dealing with an approach that may lead in unexpected directions.

Well, I guess we’ll see. Our thanks as usual, and as always.