Monday, February 3, 2020
3:50 a.m. Permeability?
We thought we would start with the concept as a reminder that structures and divisions are real but relative, relative but real.
No absolute divisions in the universe. You have told us many times.
But let’s look at that in terms of how things function. Take, as an example, the cells in a human being. The cells are definite units, functioning as units in cooperation. But they are not walled cities, barricaded and impermeable. Just the opposite, they are like market towns, existing for the purpose of interaction with their surroundings.
And so are we, right?
That’s the analogy, but in this case, it is an analogy of function more than an analogy of form. Yes, an individual human life may be considered one cell in an environment of cells, and, at a different level, the human’s constituent body cells may be considered to be in the same relationship, and, as usual, up and down the scale. As Above, So Below.
Do you see the implication? Your 3D life is not about you in isolation; it is always about you in interaction with others at your level of being. (This “level of being” may be looked at intellectually or physically or in terms of feelings, skills, etc. and any such comparison will be valid, even though the various sets of results will seem to contradict one another. And, after all, your lives seem self-contradictory to you, often enough, do they not?)
Your field of focus is of course yourself; as we have said, you are each the center of your universe. But that field of focus includes your interactions, even though you be never aware of them.
The most egotistical, autistically self-regarding individual nonetheless lives among its fellows – or did it change its own diapers as an infant, and does it bury itself after death? The most altruistic and social-minded individual nonetheless lives in its own body, sees to its own needs, makes its own choices among possibilities. You function as one, but as one among many. And so do your body’s cells, and so do the stars in their course, so to speak.
All right. Taking all that as given –
Well, you think, “We know all this,” but in fact you know it abstractly and you know it in a given moment if you happen to think about it, but you don’t spend your lives remembering it, and it might be well for you to begin to do so. Just as being here, now may be made into a conscious realization rather than merely an unnoticed fact of life, so may remembering yourself as one but one among many. Remembering that will make a difference in your life.
How? Not that I’m doubting it, but I think it would be as well to spell it out.
We smile. What a good idea!
Yeah, yeah. I feel so used.
But you are not Charlie McCarthy to our Edgar Bergen, as some people persist in suspecting. As a matter of fact, that would be a good entry-point to our desired theme. A puppet has no will, no real part to play. It is a prop, a mindless extension of the puppet-master’s will. That is not your situation in 3D. It is not your situation relative to the non-3D forces you resonate with, and it is not your situation relative to your own non-3D components. You may be compared to a weak magnet within the field of a strong one, or a canoe in white water, perhaps, but you are not an iron filing in a magnetic field, nor a canoe without a paddle.
You cannot understand your situation by considering yourself as if you lived in isolation, nor by considering yourself as a helpless pawn being moved by a chess master, be it one in 3D or one in non-3D. The fact is, you are one, but one among many.
Seems to me, it’s time for a good exemplifying image. Not sure a cell in a tissue will do it. Not active enough, and the image would make us seem more like ants in an anthill.
Yes it would. So, you want an image of cooperative individuals, or of an individual composed of societies.
Well, I hope you aren’t depending upon me for it.
It could come from you. More usually, from you as 3D focus and us as non-3D connectors of dots. That is a value of ILC as an active interconnection, a working together.
How about an army, or any other set of individuals functioning as a larger unit? Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s vision of his place in the Army, that day.
A little less regimented, perhaps. A good sense of structure but without the sense of people under discipline other than that imposed by the task rather than by the inherent structure [of the army].
I got a vague sense of – Oh, I know. Laura Ingalls Wilder, as a young girl, once watched as the railroad right of way was being constructed, and she remembered the vision all her life, the vast array of purposive activity functioning like a clock (though I don’t think that was her analogy).
Yes, a very serviceable image, perhaps, unless unwieldy. Each of those workers was a unit, but each unit functioned as a part of a larger unit with its own particular part to play. And each of those larger functional units formed part of a more intricate connected pattern that only functioned by interaction and only existed in order to interact.
I have heard you inching toward the concept of our purpose as humans in 3D life, from a social as well as from an individual development point of view.
That’s right. Your focus in this 3D life is twofold, seemingly self-contradictory, simultaneous, and of course (because natural) inescapable. You live for your own individual expression as part of your larger being. You live as part of that great chain of human beings creating and creating and creating structures apparently entirely in 3D. Note the word “apparently.”
For so many sessions, we have been examining the nature of your 3D life as if your development of the extensions of the larger being were all it was about. Now we’re going to begin to examine the 3D stage in which all this development takes place.
Not, I take it, as if the 3D world is what it seems.
That is a meaningless statement, really.
Yes, I got that even as I wrote it. And that reminds me that my focus is slipping and I need to come fully here and now.
[Spending a moment re-focusing]
Okay, what I should have said is, we are (I take it) about to consider the 3D world in more detail, but I presume that doesn’t mean we are now going to consider it as it is usually seen, as (a) the only game in town, (b) nevertheless, dead and “objective.”
No, we are going to continue to look at it, only looking deeper, as the shared subjectivity that it is. The world is as alive as you are; it is a unit of cooperating individuals, and is a congeries of clashing components, depending upon how you wish to (or are forced by your mental makeup to) see it.
Only, don’t forget what you have learned about what you are, in our new exploration of what you live among.
Today’s theme was? Permeability?
Call it Inter-relation. And next time we will begin with that image of cooperative road-building.
Our thanks as always. Interesting to get a sense of structure that I had not really had before. We have looked at 3D humans as extensions of the larger beings and now we are to look at them vis a vis each other as we live in 3D. It’s like a whole section has closed.
You could look at it that way. Or, let us say, you could structure your report that way.
Assuming I ever write it. Okay, till next time.