Wednesday, November 13, 2019
4:40 a.m. Jim Austin read “impersonally originating emotion” to mean impersonal in nature, which I don’t think is what you meant.
No. Impersonally originating – that is, they did not originate in 3D individuals. But he and his guidance are quite right that the energies are not impersonal in the sense of being neutral in nature.
I think I’ll quote his comment.
Print it out and we will comment on it – take off from it – another time.
I could print it now, if you wish.
No, later is fine. Today let’s look at the fact that 3D life in and of itself is not sufficient. This of course says it can be sufficient only in another context.
Recognizing that yesterday’s discussion will not have convinced everyone.
Nothing ever convinces everyone. The personal subjective element is too much a part of the equation for that to happen. You might not even find it desirable if it did. But that’s another story.
You can see that 3D life is one stage in a process. It has inputs from one end, outputs at another end, and the life itself processes those inputs, resulting in those outputs.
Like a logic circuit.
Or a manufacturing floor, or a written sentence in language, or many similar analogies, yes. A process may need to be examined as if it were a thing in itself, but finally it will be understood only as part of whatever larger process it serves.
“As above, so below”: It is a part of something larger and it is the “something larger” of smaller assemblies.
That is an illuminating if mechanical way to see it. Better would be, an organ is part of a larger organism, and is itself a larger organism to those cells and processes it comprises. In general, the less mechanistic the analogy, the better.
Because everything is alive.
Because that, and because the aliveness may tend to be obscured by the seeming deadness, inertness, that matter often presents.
Now, you may want to ask yourselves, whyever would we think that 3D life is separate from the rest of life? Where would that idea come from?
That doesn’t seem so hard. The evidence of our senses on the one hand, the hidden nature of the rest of reality on the other.
Well, pursue that. Why would it be that you (culturally, not individually, speaking) would distinguish between sensory evidence and non-sensory evidence?
That really is cultural, I guess. That is poisoned fruit from the Enlightenment. Though come to think of it the ancient Greeks were a little that way.
Closer examination will show you that most people, in fact we would say everybody, is “a little that way.” It is a matter of temperament, and mood, and circumstance, as well as culture. A culture sufficiently relaxed to allow great freedom of belief is necessarily going to allow – great freedom of belief! That is, you can’t expect to have it both ways. Either your culture will be as binding and comforting as swaddling clothes, or it will not. If it is, there is little room for exploration, and little uncertainty. If it is not, there will by definition be freedom to see things differently. It is in part a matter of choice, only do not expect freedom to coincide with unity of vision and experience, except occasionally, if then.
And you have been gently pushing me, most of my life, to see the unity that may be found through complexity, rather than instead of complexity.
You will not live long enough to see the widespread immersion in a new more comprehensive unity that will follow the productive relative chaos of beliefs that is your time, but it will come. It generally does – and that newfound simplicity will become the platform from which new complications arise to be dealt with.
That vision of process is well understood. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis, and begin again.
Well understood by some, not by all.
As you said, nothing convinces everybody.
Let us think about what is the context for 3D life.
My God, isn’t that what you have been doing all along?
Yes, but it is not necessarily so obvious to one and all. To be on the inside of a process is to take much for granted that is never said and scarcely thought.
- If 3D life is a process – and, we assure you, it may be seen that way accurately enough – what are the inputs and outputs?
- Nor is it one process, but several, overlapping, sometimes contradicting.
- And you must bear in mind that past àpresent à future, though a necessary way to think and experience in 3D, is only somewhat Thus, misleading as well as illustrative.
- When are inputs actually outputs, and vice-versa? When the flow is opposite what you think it must be, and what you perceive it to be.
- But if you cannot reliably sort inputs from outputs, results from causes, how do you make sense of it?
- If you cannot depend upon your senses, nor your logic, not your ability to reason from cause to effect (which is not quite the same thing as logic), then where are you? And how did you get into such a fix?
Just lucky, I guess.
Yes, very funny. Or maybe truer than you know.
Some traditions say there is, in effect, a long waiting line of people wanting a crack at 3D life.
Only to arrive in 3D life and wish they were anywhere else. But perhaps the vegetable isn’t always fond of the pressure cooker.
- Not everyone is so constituted as to need to know “how things are,” much less “why things are as they are.” But those who are so constituted find nothing in earth so equally compelling. A clue, if you can see it as such.
- Some have an invincible determination (so positive as to be invisible to them as anything beyond a self-evident reality) to accept the 3D world exactly as it appears, nothing more, nothing less. Another clue.
- The interaction of these two types (and of course the bell-curve panoply between the two extremes) creates possibilities that otherwise could not exist. Final clue.
Thoreau said “Atheism itself may be comparatively popular with God.”
Yes. The resultant thought may be less important than the process of arriving there – particularly given that the process is likely to be more enduring than any given result.
Enough for the moment.
A word on the process. It seems to me, some may not realize that it appears to me, often, as if I am merely thinking aloud. It is only when I look closely that I see that this amounts to peering into the darkness and seeing light in this or that direction, and moving where the light is at the moment. How is that kind of “thinking” distinguishable from being led by “inspiration,” or from “talking to the guys”? the distinguishing feature is mostly, maybe entirely, the way we think of it.
A valid insight. Ours? Yours? A gift from the universe? A haphazardly produced side-effect? Season to taste.
Our thanks as always, even if we may be thanking ourselves perhaps.
Then “you’re welcome” will sound different too, won’t it?
And maybe just as well if it does. Till next time, then.