Two ways to see human life

Wednesday, February 5, 2020

3 a.m. Yesterday you said, Let’s glance at history and the vast impersonal forces. I think I knew what you meant then, but I don’t now. So – your turn.

It isn’t difficult, conceptually. We have been looking at the process of quilt-making, or painting, or writing, and now we will look at the quilts, or the pictures, or the poetry.

But it seems to me you are looking at more than that.

By implication, yes. Our examination will shed light on questions such as, What is the purpose of 3D creation over and above the effect of the process upon those experiencing it. This in turn involves deeper questions that perhaps we will not need to address explicitly: How real is 3D life? What is the larger relation between 3D and All-D. That sort of thing. Every question the philosophers have ever asked, at some points boils down to the question of the reality that exists beyond appearances.

Nominalists v. realists, etc.

Of course. And there is no use in picking sides in such debates, like boys choosing teams. That may be important for your own comfort, like choosing seat at the arena – sol or sombra or sol y sombra [sun, shade, or sun and shade]: Where you sit does not determine what happens at the bullfight. So, rather than support this or that broad generalization about living, let’s look at some examples.

Lincoln always comes to mind immediately, don’t know why.

Don’t you? He was your first hero, imprinted on your mind before you were 13, and never supplanted. Not a bad choice of example, either, he is so complex and universally recognized, if not necessarily known.

Someone’s larger being put forth certain elements of its being and produced Abraham Lincoln in Kentucky in 1809. That baby, that boy, that young man, that man in the full vigor of his manhood, gathered his strength and developed it and lived his life. Do you think he spent his life thinking of himself as people looking backward thought of him? He lived as anyone lives, confronting each day’s problems, living his contradictions, feeling his way toward what he would become. That is true of anybody.

Yet he had a persistent irrational feeling that he was meant to accomplish one great deed, and had that idea – spoke of it – years before its nature came into view.

That’s the other half of life, also true of anybody: Lincoln’s life was not only his own; it was a cog in a vast machine, or, let’s say, a detail in a vast panorama. Actually, a better analogy is needed, and now is the time to find it.

You want something more living and interactive.

We do. He was creating himself, and that affected the larger being he was part of. But he was acting on a common 3D stage, and that affected other people and their larger beings.

I see that. It’s true, we haven’t been looking very closely at that.

So, come up with an image, more interactive than a painter and its oils.

I suppose we’re going to need something to do with computers, for the sake of the aspects of cooperative input, and continually changing output. It is like each larger being is a programmer, each 3D individual is a program, and the 3D world in general is the creation of all those programs interacting?

Still slightly unfocused and clumsy.

Yes, it is. But getting toward it, I think. Certainly the electronic speed has to be part of it, and the ever-fluctuating, or let’s say ever-responsive, result.

What if the 3D beings are not programs but traits?

Like chromosomes or something biological?

On that order.

Well – perhaps I’m handicapped here by my lack of scientific knowledge.

No, it isn’t knowledge that is needed, but a certain feel for it.

And you can’t just give it to us –

No, we need to find it together, in this case.

I had a fleeting thought involving a flock of birds, tacking at the same instant. Telepathic links to fuse biological entities into one larger entity.

Pursue it, remembering Chamberlain’s mental flash of himself as part of a vast thing made up of so many thousand individuals.

We’re taking up this whole session searching.

So? If we accomplish the task, it will be time well employed.

I don’t have it yet. I will recalibrate, so as to bring everything to bear.

[Did.]

I keep coming back to that flock of birds, wheeling.

Pursue it. Are you in 3D one of the birds, and the society you live in the flock?

Well now, that’s interesting. A flock of birds is not the whole world, is it? It isn’t even all the birds. A flock is a connected number of birds. There are other flocks, some of the same species, some of other species. There are herds of animals, societies of flowers and trees.

Don’t go too far too fast, but that’s right.

Remembering As Above, So Below.

Of course.

So if I as a 3D being am a product of my larger being, that’s one thing. I am also part of a flock or herd of related 3D beings, each of which is a product of larger beings. My own, perhaps, and also other larger beings. It is a sort of federation.

Call it family, or society, and the effect is no less and may be more.

I have felt, all my life, that we are herd animals and individuals, both.

And this is true of buffalo and fish and birds no less. Each animal must take care of itself, but the “itself” is by nature a part of something greater, more extensive, than itself. That’s why sometimes individuals sacrifice willingly for others.

Mothers for their children.

Not only that, though. Firefighters for other people’s children. Soldiers for people they will never meet. Schoolteachers for pupils they will never see again.

I take it that image of birds wheeling together through the skies is what we want. Why birds and not a herd of horses, say, or deer?

The additional element of freedom lent by flying is useful.

So now you have Lincoln. An historical character, a man living his life, both. Or St. Columba, or King Louis XIV, or Stalin or anybody known or unknown, of good character and good effect or bad. You are all herd animals, you are all individuals. You may all be seen as you appear in 3D, and you may all be seen as you extend beyond 3D, though here you are seen mostly by whatever shadows you may cast.

We came to Lincoln as an example right off, but we haven’t gone anywhere with him.

There is time. Besides, in helping us to come up with a useful image, he served and will serve very well.

A towering figure, to my mind. But I may be biased.

And you may not. He was – is – a towering figure, but his public life is only a hint. And spelling this out is going to take a while, and will lead us far.

Are we going to talk with him, as I did some years ago?

That depends. We’ll see. There are disadvantages as well as advantages to any course of exploration.

“Exploration.” The right word?

Pursuit, then. Close enough.

So the image is a flock of birds. The theme is titled –

3D and its extensions.

Excuse me, but that doesn’t seem to express what we have just come though. How about “A living analogy.”

Let’s say, “Two ways to see human life.” It isn’t exact but will do.

All right. And next time?

We will continue to look at Lincoln as an example of the human life as it has significance beyond the individual and beyond the 3D. That’s where we will begin, anyway.

Thanks as always.