Shared subjectivity

Sunday, January 26, 2020

3:30 a.m. I have been asked a question I am reluctant to try to answer, for more than one reason, and overnight, it occurred to me there was a very good reason for my reluctance, more than just a hesitation to impose my interpretation.

It’s worth pursuing. Perhaps we are part of the source of your reluctance (assuming a difference between us and you, rather than a difference in emphasis).

I remembered that you said at some point that it is a big mistake to try to understand new material by merely fitting it into our established understandings.

Yes. It is one form of “nothing but,” and prevents or at least retards the making of new connections from a different point of view. It only reinforces the old one.

To be clear, the specific question was if shared subjectivity was more or less what some people call consensus reality. The first reason I couldn’t answer the question is that I don’t know what either term means, and the second is that although I have a pretty good sense of shared subjectivity, I don’t know at all what others mean by consensus reality. I know what I think they mean, sort of.

You have a deeper reluctance than that, rooted in the ambivalence you have always had about New Age certainties and ideas that became dogmas.

Yes, that’s so.

However, let us look at shared subjectivity, so that instead of giving our opinion of what someone may mean about what they may or may not have understood, we can talk of what we know.

My sense of it is that you are saying that the “external” world is as alive and as eternal as our individual internal worlds; it is not a dead fixed thing any more than matter is dead units occupying space.

That, but more than that. Internal and external are the same thing, the same process, the same working-out of the interplay of forces. Only, just as any one body is one body among all living and dead humanity, so one 3D mind is one mind among all living and no longer living (in 3D) minds. You are the center of your mental universe; everybody is. Extend that idea and you see a universe of live minds, not a hierarchy.

That was too cryptic.

Think of it as a summary statement delivered in advance of the exposition.

  • You are each the center; hence, there is no one center, no implied hierarchy of “central” and “less central” and “more central.”
  • You are each the universe in miniature, and at the same time you are each a splinter of the entirety.

Fractals? Bits of a hologram?

Those are analogies, not bad ones but, as with all analogies, not identical with what is being epitomized.

  • There is no “then” in the real world. The time is always “now.” The year 1865 is no less alive now. Ten minutes ago is no less alive now than it was then. This has consequences. Thinking of the moving moment of “now” as differentiating between what is briefly alive as opposed to what is dead or not yet existent distorts reality.

I think the point requires emphasizing. When you first got it across to me, it clarified a lot that otherwise made no sense.

There is nothing dead, be it moments of time or the things contained in those moments. But your access to any moment except “now” is non-existent in 3D, by design. (Access via non-3D is another thing.) We’ve said all this.

  • Every thing, every mind, every moment of time, being alive, where is there room for anything to be fixed, unalterable, dead?
  • Everything being part of everything, where is there room for division and separations other than in a relative sense?
  • These things being so, surely it follows that “individual” is only a localized version of “universal.”

Not sure that will be understood as meant.

Is anything?

Very funny.

Everything we have said or will say is simple and self-evident when seen from the right standing-place, and is convoluted and even irritating when seen from other standing-places.

That gave me a whole new idea of how you work.

And necessarily. [That is, how they work by necessity.] But spell it out.

By giving us descriptions of how things are, sometimes in great detail, you provide us with something to react against. By how irritating or how opaque it is, we can tell how far off we are. When we stand in the right place, it snaps into clarity.

We can’t quite sign off on that way of putting it. That makes it sound like we are confusing people deliberately. But true, that’s the effect. Our plainest statement is mystifying if you try to cram it into an accustomed way of seeing things that does not fit. You can’t believe both that every thing is alive and that the universe is composed mostly of dead matter; nor both that every moment (and its contents) is alive and that the universe is composed mostly of dead matter.

Until you choose a perspective, two contrary perspectives will be a jumble of incompatibles. But an excellent way of realigning your view is to adopt multiple viewpoints, for just that reason.

That is – I’m pretty sure you mean – if we want to escape our accustomed limited perspective, one way to escape it is to tentatively adopt another, and see where the discontinuities are between them. Does that mean we can never come to a fixed perspective?

Not at all; people do it all the time. This is for when your previous certainties no longer satisfy but you can’t quite see your way to a higher synthesis. But no matter how high your present viewpoint, there is always another to be achieved, now or later.

You promised Rita she would never be bored, because she’d never come to the end of mental exploration.

That is confining it a bit, but true enough.

One thing you said seems so obvious, it may bear repeating and restating.

It isn’t difficult. To learn something new as an added item in your inventory, you connect it to what you know. That is not what we are doing together here. Here we are suspending what we know as concepts and rather than trying to add something new, we are trying to look at what we already know from a different angle, to see how our new standing-point may be. So, to try to add new viewpoints to old structures is to defeat the purpose. Again, we have said this many times, but, as we have also said many times, the temptation is very hard for 3D-oriented minds to resist. Addition always seems more sensible than substitution or deliberately imposed uncertainty.

And I’d bet that most people, most of the time, read what you just said, nod agreement, and continue to try to fit whatever you say into their comfortable accustomed mental categories.

You should know.

Touché. Are you accusing me of being human?

We’d never do that; you do it enough yourself. Enough for the moment.

Our thanks as always. What should we title this session?

Shared subjectivity.

Okay. Thanks.

 

10 thoughts on “Shared subjectivity

  1. “Here we are suspending what we know as concepts” … brave words, as are “it is a big mistake to try to understand new material by merely fitting it into our established understandings.” Yet it’s not trivial to not-believe what one believes, to switch world-views. Perhaps there is a ‘middle path,’ similar to the step-wise process that science and engineering use to get past outgrown knowledge and into deeper/better understanding.

    Guidance suggests that “consensus reality” can be seen as a very narrow vision of “shared subjectivity” … limited and distorted by misconceptions about who/what is consenting, and what is reality, but useful as a ‘pointer.’

    In that context such considerations can be pointer-sparks in the right directions … giving plenty of different angles to allow new vision and grow understanding.

  2. One thing that has come to me: we as a culture are playing a sort of cultural war where we insist that good guys are winners and the bad are losers. And there is also that counter-story where baddies win and good guys lose – the dystopia. The good christians versus satan-worshippers might be one setup of the game. But in reality, sometimes the good guys lose, sometimes they win. And vice versa – tha baddies can win and lose, too. So winning-losing and being good-bad are different games. Sometimes they overlap, sometimes not.

    1. And the specific learning for me is that being attached to results as validation for goodness/rightness is a mistake. A very protestant mistake, common too. A mistake I keep repeating. Requiring and expecting outer validation. And the only validation that matters is the inner validation.

      1. In this culture it is quite difficult to give oneself validation for losing, having little to contribute, or generally failing. The environment has taught us to endlessly cheer: try harder, fix this&that, change, improve so you can be better. And it may be that getting lots of variation in experiences of failure is the lesson that is there to be ingested fully. And it will repeat until it gets validated by the experiencer.

        I feel such a clown for having a lively solo conversation, but it is just one of my – don’t know what to call it. A feature? Not quite certain if I wanted that feature, but too tired to suppress it right now.

        1. When I have a conversation with myself, I never have to say, “Huh? What did you say?” It seems as I get older, more people are mumbling, ya know? [smile]

        2. Kristiina,
          I feel most of us who’ve ‘followed’ Frank/TGU this far down the rabbit hole are ‘clowns,’ in the sense we are different 🙂 from most of the population: we talk to ourselves/guidance a lot. The dearth of posts here implies (to me) that these ‘sparks’ are more for talking to guidance than for nattering at each other.

          I post
          1. because guidance wants to add to (very occasionally disagree with) something the Frank/TGU mind has said.
          2. writing my post helps me better understand both TGU’s original post and guidance’s issues with/about it.

          The ‘payoff’ comes when I see TGU say what (I think) I just posted … corroboration really helps that world-view shift!
          Jim

  3. Thank you for your consolation. My issue seems to be that I am painfully aware of the gap between the prevailing shared subjectivity and my private subjectivity. The shared human subjectivity is a sort of pressure-field that chafes me when I know I am getting too close to the boundaries. And this is unavoidable because I know a lot of my life is outside the current shared subjectivity (to use this term – I would probably call it human mind-field on my own). So the shared-subjectivity choir inside me sings the siren song of don’t go over the boundaries of the pancake, and most importantly, don’t ever tell, and whaterver is outside the pancake is non-existent because existence is shared subjectivity. Pancake is the flat-earth world-view. And it is funny now that I say it: I know that this shared subjectivity will change just like the flat earth view changed. But being the wall-breaker both in the inner and in the outer has some downsides. Even though I know I am not forced to do it. It is just the most interesting game in the town for me. But to get back to my original point: the current shared subjectivity wants us to have outer success and achieve. But wanting these things will be obstacles in finding the way forward from the flat earth view. Lifestyles recommended by religions look like they enable getting outside the pancake, but we are at a point where we cannot pretend that it has to be one religion and one path. To pretend that his one system contains everything and declaring any outside it as some kind of offense is making religion into just another pancake.

    1. Hmmm … I don’t feel TGU ever meant to imply “don’t go over the boundaries” of shared subjectivity, and guidance is very clear to me that that is not what ‘they’ espouse.

      For me the message is know that one of (?) the vast impersonal/personal forces I live in is ‘shared subjectivity,’ work to understand it, then live my life (better) from that (hopefully increasing) place of understanding.

      Perhaps Frank and/or TGU would like to weigh in?

      1. Perhaps I’d better. In general I don’t, because I don’t want to be put into the position of being a guru, but in this case, you’re making it all way too complicated.

        If instead of “shared subjectivity” you were to say “what looks like objective physical reality but is really the creation and representation of the mind-stuff of everyone,” you would have a rough working definition. But it is very clumsy, and describing “objective” reality as instead “shared subjectivity” seemed a more economical way to say it.

        In other words, reality is *all one thing*. It isn’t subjectivity on one side and objectivity on the other; isn’t minds or spirits on one side and things on the other; isn’t the mental world on one side and the independently existent physical world on the other.

        As far as i know, that’s what the guys mean by shared subjectivity. No need for intricate gyrations. The need is to readjust your worldview to see the “objective” world as part of the great mind.

      2. Jim, I completely agree with what you’re saying. I am just unclear in my expression. The prevailing mind-field is one thing (shared subjectivity), the way I experience it in me as limiting is another (and the limiting is mostly in me, through education), and the all-D potential is yet another thing. Intricate gyrations is whre we come to, when trying to somehow describe things that are not held firmly in shared subjectivity. I was recently commenting on an architecture photo in FB that someone saw looking like a toilet seat. I saw the shape of an angel. Our brains are wired quite individually.

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