Monday, January 27, 2020
3:50 a.m. So, about those vast impersonal forces – ?
We smile too. It seems to you we endlessly circle around a promised coming attraction and make no move toward it. But as you know, this method of ours is not chosen casually, nor whimsically. Only by becoming thoroughly familiar with a concept, so that you can take it for granted, can you establish a context for seeing something new, or for seeing something familiar as new, because seen differently.
Shared subjectivity as a concept to replace our idea of objectivity or “the world out there,” as one example.
Yes. When you can see the world as alive in all respects, you can see yourselves and your relation to it differently. How many ways we have said the same thing! And the problem is that most of our words are wasted. Words are among the least efficient ways to convey new understanding. They can do it, but only as sparks (poetry, say) or as long chains of exposition, basically describing everything in order to show anything in a new light. And who can describe everything?
Your words are mostly wasted, I take it, because mostly we recipients consciously or unconsciously take in new concepts only to warp them by attaching them to old concepts.
Yes, and pretty much by necessity. You can’t reinvent your understanding of the world every time you read (or receive) a new transmission. But to say that is merely to say it isn’t anybody’s fault, it’s just the limitations of the situation. We ask you to transcend, knowing full well how little able anyone is at any given moment – but also knowing that every so often, the right words spoken in the right way will allow someone to get it. That private, individual, irreproducible, unpredictable moment is the sunflower seed for which all this shelling of husks is worth doing.
I get that. I hope you didn’t strain yourselves with that metaphor.
Oddly, it “came to us,” as you might say, and we adopted it because it gave a sense of a tiny return for a seemingly disproportionate effort.
Okay, Farmer Brown, now what?
Now, another attempt, of course.
- The idea of shared subjectivity is to eliminate the unconscious idea of a division between subjective and objective, between individuals and the world they live in. We’re all one thing. There is no them and us, no here and there, no then and now, except relatively, for sorting-out purposes, one might say.
- Therefore, to speak of “vast impersonal forces” is merely to remind you that the interaction between “you” and “the world” is continuous and at all levels.
- Therefore, too, “vast impersonal forces” and “vast personal forces” are two ways of saying the same thing because they are two ways of experiencing the same things.
- You do not exist in a vacuum. The world does not revolve around you. Yet you do not revolve around the world, either. Neither do you and the world exist in parallel, nor is the world any more an illusion than is your life. Mistranslated, yes. Other than it seems, yes. Imperfectly understood, yes. But you live. Your life is real. The world exists. The shared subjectivity is
In other words, “Maya” doesn’t mean sleight of hand, but more like “seen in a mist”?
Leave off tying this to other concepts.
Oops. You’re right, sorry.
- The forces that flow through your life may be equally well described as the currents in your particular life reflect (and affect) the times you live in. This is a cliché, seen one way. Seen another way, it is a door opening outward.
If a strong wind blows, it will be experienced as good or evil not by its intrinsic nature (which is neither) but by the effect it has. Sailboats react to the same wind as do windmills and trees. Same wind; three different effects. And if it is a hurricane, well, hurricanes have beneficial effects, usually unnoticed because of the destruction that accompanies them, but in any case the hurricane has nothing of good or evil in its composition. It is; it is not good or evil. Its effects may be bad from one point of view and good from another, but its effects have nothing to do with its intrinsic nature.
As I was writing that, I got a sense of a hurricane being a huge release of stress, like an earthquake.
A relative rebalancing, yes. How many people, reading of (or, still less, experiencing) a hurricane, think of it as a necessary rebalancing of forces? Yet it is so.
I don’t know why it should seem to be a new idea, this uncoupling of a thing’s nature from its effects, but that is how it is striking me.
You are experiencing the effect of seeing it from a different viewpoint. You all your life have seen hurricanes as destructive forces – that is, you have seen them from the point of view of individuals experiencing their effects. Now you saw them as natural rebalancing; that is, you saw them from the point of view of the world at large.
Pray tell, how is it helpful to draw a physical analogy to non-physical processes, but not helpful to draw on our metaphysical understandings to incorporate new statements? Never mind, it is clear as soon as I state it.
But not necessarily clear to all. Go ahead.
A 3D analogue illustrates; a non-3D analogue tends to correlate. Not the same thing at all.
Examples provide vivid mental images. Connections to existing beliefs produce logic-chains, and that isn’t the same thing at all. It is the difference between a gestalt and a computer program.
Got it. You expressed it better than I could.
No, actually, it’s the same process. Continuing to look at the same problem results, sometimes, in added clarity. Another way to say it, pulling the same bit of yarn sometimes untangles the skein. If you keep at it, clearer ways of seeing emerge, and it doesn’t matter so much whether your 3D or your non-3D intelligence, or both, or both alternately, does the pulling.
But if our minds are in the non-3D –?
Your minds are in the non-3D. Your 3D expression receives that mind partly directly (intuition) and partly indirectly (via the brain), and in both cases expresses through the limited subjectivity that is you. So, there’s a difference. You might say (inaccurately, but productively) that TGU represents the world at large and your own 3D-oriented consciousness represents the unique product of your 3D experience.
Inaccurately?
After all, everything mixes.
Okay, I see that. What may be separated for the purposes of analysis isn’t necessarily really separate at all.
Let’s say, rarely or never separates cleanly. The trick is to see things one way, then another, remembering that any one view is only an approximation. The end in view is not to convince but to inspire.
You can’t convince anybody of anything anyway.
Not in the sense of mentally over-awing, no, nor would it be good if one could. But one can set forth a shower of sparks, any one of which may be the one, to ignite the fabric, leading to illumination.
I swear, you are overworking your metaphor-producing machine.
You will find that the image of flying sparks persists beyond the memory of the chain of words that produced it. And enough for the moment.
So, today’s theme?
“Hurricanes.”
Okay. And our next theme?
The usefulness of individual interpretation of hurricanes. That isn’t really accurate, but it will start us up.
Okay, our thanks as always.