Thursday, October 7, 2010
4:30 AM. Well, here we are. I didn’t do any work on the notes yesterday though I meant to. So in theory I ought to be raring to go this morning, but I’m not. Too full of congestion, for one thing, that makes it hard to think. Since I’m not thinking anyway, you guys have anything to say?
We gather that our recent dispatches haven’t seemed all that helpful. We do maintain that over time they will become clearer in meaning and application, but perhaps it would be as well to move on to other things for the moment.
That would be fine. Such as?
Such as reminders, perhaps. This whole conversation is for the purpose of offering you assistance in reorienting your consciousness. All around you, you see people disoriented, fearful, therefore angry. The ones you call “the bright boys” – the people who think they are directing human destiny because they are in positions of influence in various fields – themselves feel powerless, or anyway overwhelmed. It may be hard to remember that even the most shortsighted or narrowly selfish actions will seem to their originating consciousness the preferred response, else they would not be taken. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” people say, expressing this. A long moment’s thought ought to make it obvious that your society’s problems are so deep and extensive – essentially involving the entire world economy and dozens if not hundreds of international relationships, and tens of thousands of corporate relationships strategic enough to impact entire countries and regions, problems involving so many fields of organization – that none of it is anybody’s “fault.”
Or, let’s put it a slightly different way. Where so many factors enter into the making of a problem, the accuracy or use of laying blame is destroyed. This, even for analytical rather than moral/judgmental reasons.
Thus, you have a huge number of overlapping ecological crises, everything from mass extinctions to resource depletion and pollution, to the accelerating impact of genetic modification, to fertility loss in plant and animal life, to the systemic desertification of the land. What is the use of saying this all stems from a given political party’s ideological stance, or a given country’s policies, or the body/mind split in Western culture, or, for that matter, The Fall Of Man? Why not spend your time laying blame for the path of an earthquake or hurricane? (This blame-laying, you will note, is being done, as suspicion becomes all pervasive. Secrecy over time destroys not only trust but emotional and mental balance.) Extraordinary webs of interconnecting crisis, to paraphrase Carl Sagan, demand extraordinary analysis. It isn’t any good deriving emotional satisfaction by hating scapegoats while the waters continue to rise around you.
In a fairly rhetorical mood, this morning, I see.
We’re perfectly willing to discuss other things.
No, go ahead. But it just seemed more like rhetoric than analysis.
Au contraire. An analysis that is radical enough, thoroughgoing enough, can only appear to be rhetorical, for it either stacks evidence upon evidence or paints with a broad brush – that is, it proceeds either vertically or horizontally – and conveys an impression of monomania. Yet what is the use of an analysis that is superficial or incomplete for the sake of appearing to be balanced?
Here is the point in a nutshell. Everything is coming to a head in the same time. Not all on the same day, but all in the same era. When revolutions in every field of endeavor and in every sphere of organization all come to a head at the same time, the narrower your field of inquiry, the more superficial will be your understanding of what is happening. Your understanding of the how of what’s happening in any given field will be greater, in a sense, as you narrow your focus, but you will increasingly misconstrue the why of it. And, in fact, your grasp of the “how” will be increasingly skewed, because progressively overlooking ever more vital interconnections with other fields. It would be like looking at the Civil War through economic lenses and concluding that 600,000 men were killed because of tariff policies.
We began on this theme five years ago, and that is long enough ago that you have long since released it from RAM. As you re-read the conversations you will bring back into active relationship those observations. It is not an economic crisis you are enmeshed in, nor a political or ideological nor scientific nor commercial nor ecological one. It is not merely a matter of nations and the forces behind nations playing The Great Game, nor is it entirely the working out of the larger implications of what Joseph calls “hog-ism.” All these things affect your life on earth at the moment, but how much do they concern your immortal life beyond?
I got the idea that our lives matter across the veil just as they do here.
That’s very true. That’s the point of all this effort to communicate. But what is it that matters? What is it in human life that is central, and malleable, and (being under your control) that which should concern you?
Consciousness.
To be sure. But what does that mean in practice?
Well, when you pose it that way, maybe I’m not sure. I guess I have been sort of sloppily assuming that the more conscious we all are, the less stupidly we will behave and the more human our lives will be. But I see in this moment of clarity that that isn’t anything but muddle-headed thinking – if it can be dignified by the name of thinking. It’s akin to the line of “thought” that assumes that the true meaning of Christ amounts to admonitions to feelings of goodwill and social work.
Yes – and so?
Well, let me focus on it. The true reason to increase our consciousness is to broaden our connection with unsuspected forces within us and around us.
Say that is so. Why?
Why? To be more what we are meant to be. To take our true place in the world.
Do those answers satisfy you?
They certainly do not, once I express them.
Then, what is our purpose in doing this? What is your purpose in living here and now, in your life’s circumstances?
If I can believe my feelings – and I don’t know what better to rely on – our purpose is both internal and external, or both personal and more-than-personal. On a personal level, is to wake up as best we can, and I presume that once we are awake, further goals will become evident that we cannot expect to see while we are still asleep. On a more-than-personal level, I suppose we are contributing to a reshaping of the external forms we live among (within) so that new human possibilities will be fostered.
To paraphrase: to fit yourselves for a new way of being, and to help bring into existence a new mode of culture that will help bring the new way of being from what seems like “outside” forces. Not a bad definition, provided that you keep in mind that your way of helping to midwife the new civilization may be as much by transforming yourselves (providing templates) as by anything external you may do.
I hear the old refrain: “All is well, all is always well.”
Suppose the opposite. Do you really think that reality – what you sometimes call The Universe – could get itself all balled up? Is it likely that creation is in danger, that the greater order totters precariously on the brink? That’s just petty-mindedness talking. Or, not petty-mindedness (as that connotes unworthy motives) but lack of understanding, a sort of magical thinking that misjudges cause and effect. It is trying to analyze the mountain by close attention to the molehill. This is not the same as our maxim “as above, so below,” though at first glance it will seem like it. Rather, it is a form of reductionism, a cutting-down-to-size something that is inconveniently large, and then assuming that it was never larger to start with, or that larger wasn’t an essential quality that changed when removed.
Let’s put it this way, every “individual’s” decisions matter, both for the person-group and, by extension, for all the rest of humanity to which it is indirectly attached. But at the same time, all of human activity at all levels combined are insufficient to harm anything in the fabric of reality. It’s a paradox, but an accurate statement. Live with it and see if you can’t feel your way into it.