Processing

Tuesday, January 28, 2020

3:15 a.m. You said we would resume by talking of the usefulness of individual interpretation of hurricanes, whatever that means. But first I’d like to say that I gather that people don’t quite know what to make of “shared subjectivity.” I get it as saying simply that subjective and objective is merely two ways of seeing the same thing, and it seems to me you have explained it very clearly. Still, it seems too foreign to people’s accustomed concepts for them to move to see it that way.

It is a pretty old debate, idealist v. realist, etc. It amounts to asking how real the external world is, and, if it isn’t as it appears, what is it? You can’t expect one set of explanations to settle the subject for everybody, because any set of explanations represents one way of seeing things. Don’t worry about it.

You used to say, “Don’t worry about it,” to Rita, and she would bristle and say, “I’m not worrying about it.”

Yes, good memories.

Oh yes, I get the sense of you lurking there, Miss Rita. Striking, how just mentioning you brings your presence near.

Or vice-versa. Or really, both.

The usual reciprocating process. Okay, but then, yesterday’s announced theme?

Remember, we were out to link the vast impersonal forces to the human life of continuous choice. Hurricanes are a good representative image of vast impersonal forces. Of course, so is a mild summer breeze, but a hurricane is dramatic, makes a better image. Once get the idea with a hurricane and you will have it with summer breezes no less.

I take it you aren’t going to focus the human end of the image on how people in hurricane country learn to live.

We could. That’s a part of life, after all, preparing. But let’s – come to think of it, we could use as example people living in places where there is a continuing presence, a strong unceasing wind that is not of hurricane force but cannot be ignored either.

Something like the Outer Hebrides?

That would serve. In any case, the essential part of the image is that the force is part of the environment people live in, and they adapt to it. Only this is a little too abstract.

Yes, I get that too. What people do in response doesn’t seem to matter. Need a better example?

Let’s return to hurricane country. People live their lives mostly with hurricanes only as potential, yet an overshadowing potential.

Yes. It may not come, but they’re always aware that in a certain time of the year, it might.

You could even say, they will, only not perhaps in any given place. Living thus in a state of everyday expectation of the possibility as a fact of life, in a way it isn’t all that different from knowing that Spring will follow Winter. You see? It is just part of life. It may not come your way this year, but if it does, well, it doesn’t astonish you.

Take an emotional storm as a rough analogy. Be it anger, despair, lust, corrosive envy, whatever, it is powerful beyond ordinary life, it is (hopefully, for the individual) episodic rather than continuous, and it is disruptive and, while it lasts, central. You all live in hurricane country, and you each cope differently. Some of you are so constructed as to be more vulnerable, or less vulnerable, to these forces just as islanders may live in places more prone or less prone to be in hurricanes’ paths.

As you put in a couple of those emotional equivalents, I thought, Here we are again with the Seven Deadly Sins, only this time without them being assigned to individual culpability.

“Missing the mark.” That’s the definition of sin you gravitate toward. Here is a way of seeing it that bypasses guilt and centers on living in weather.

Very interesting. I think you mean, we could look upon – no, it’s too hard to phrase it. You do it.

You as 3D soul – that is, as the specific combination of traits living together in one time-place – are so constructed as to leave you more susceptible to some kinds of errors and less susceptible to other kinds. That’s just the difference in character that results from many factors, as we have discussed. For one person, lust may be only a passing temptation; for another, it may be a leitmotif. For the same individual, it may be important at one time and not at others. You see, all we are saying amounts to, people are different and within each person, different times bring different opportunities and temptations to the fore.

So if you take the Seven Deadly Sins as being an abstract definition of atmospheric conditions, you could say Lust, Anger, Pride, etc. are always there as potential weather, and some people are more comprised to channel them than are others; also, anyone may be more aligned with them at any one time than at another.

List them yet again, because people will not have incorporated the list in their mental toolbox, and notice this time how different they look when you consider them as forces rather than as accusations. Give each its own line when you transcribe them.

Pride, first, but using my LEG CAPS (LEG CAPE) mnemonic,

Lust

Envy

Gluttony

Covetousness

Anger

Pride

Sloth or Ennui

Now again we say, look at these as descriptions of the weather of the world you live in, not as descriptions of other people’s behavior, or of your own. If you, as a 3D being functioning in varying awareness of your steadying non-3D component, live among these sets of atmospheric conditions, you can see that how you feel, even who you experience yourself as being, is going to vary.

That makes the sins opportunity as well as pitfall.

Very good. Let’s say, though, it makes them more neutral than they are usually seen, in the way that a hurricane is not “nature’s fury,” it just is what it is, a rebalancing.

Presumably virtues are opportunities. Can they be pitfalls?

Anything may be. These are inputs, and your 3D lives are the processors. It is because you process them that the output has the quality of variation. No 3D minds to live the interaction of the forces, no transformation, no – shall we say – integration.

Even when we make lousy choices, it’s still integration?

When a computer processes data, the output may be meaningful or not, depending upon the program, but it will be output, not input. It will have been transformed by the processing.

We had better pause here, a little early, merely because we are at a natural place to pause. Call this session “Processing,” and the next will concern the difference between 3D life as it applies to the larger being and 3D life as it applies to the world around it.

Thanks as always.

 

Leave a Reply