Spirals and freedom

Wednesday, May 13, 2020

[Yesterday I was aching to write fiction of the depth and honesty of Hemingway’s, and I was remembering his telling himself, in his early days, that all he had to do was write one true sentence, and then add the next true sentence….]

6:30 a.m. The only true sentence I would be able to write would be my own life story from inside. That is not a fiction – at least, not intentionally! – but it may be all I could do.

Gentlemen? Why should one be born with an ache to do something that one

Oh. Is it that simple, that parts of me sort of remember other strands and their motivations and perhaps even their achievements? Interesting thought, and it would explain a lot, including my unreasoning but wrong certainty that I would achieve instant mastery of skills that are beyond me, and that I have not attempted to master. Is it that simple?

Perhaps your inner life, if expressed, might serve to show others the drawbacks to unacknowledged connections as they play out in a life.

Meaning, if I had known that they were resonances rather than pre-knowings, I might have turned them to advantage.

You’ll need to go a lot slower than that! But yes, that is one implication to be drawn. In general, life is confused by many unsuspected or unacknowledged

I get – I might go through my journals and merely string together insights into life I have had over the years.

Tempting, but – temptation.

Like Paul Brunton’s notebooks, you mean, a lot of disconnected paragraphs?

Slow down. What is it with you today? Do you know?

I expect you’ll tell me.

Something within woke up wanting to go back to work.

So it has been sleeping? Since when, and why?

It sleeps and wakes because you are ruled by the moon. [That is, my natal chart is entirely disposited by the moon, which renders my life cyclical like the moon. That’s a shorthand way to put it, anyway.] Ebbing and flowing are natural to you and cannot be eliminated, only governed. As to the last time you went to sleep – or let us say, “it” did – you must look to your own records for that. If you were able to keep good track of your larger moods, let’s call them, you’d see the pattern and could adjust to it.

If I had mastered astrology, would that have told me?

You don’t know what you are asking, quite. It could have given you a tide table, but to understand it and profit by it, you would have had to know of the thing being measured, and to know of how to properly use the information. Astrology is not for the purpose of saying “do this” or “don’t do this” at any given moment. It is more like, “Here is the state of the tide; if you set out at this moment, here are the conditions you will meet.”

Astrology works because all reality is one thing. But that implies that the external world is “out there” as it appears, rather than being an exteriorized part of ourselves.

No, remember, you as individuals are not independent of atmosphere; atmosphere is independent of you. Similarly, and for the same reason, exterior reality is independent of individuals; it exists; it has its own continuity, just as the senses and “common sense” testify. Only, that doesn’t at all contradict the statement that interior and exterior are one.

I’m getting there; not quite with you yet.

Ponder for a moment.

Each of us is a small specialized portion of the great mind that is all things. So too each of us is a small specialized portion of that mind as it expresses as material.

Yes. If you try to express that, you will need many words, perhaps. A picture would serve better, an image, a gestalt.

Our bodies are physical, and share the stubbornness of matter. But matter itself is not what it seems (disconnected, dead, independent of us), but is a sort of slower bound form.

You might think of a spiral, with the non-3D world as the widest, freest extreme, and the material world as the tightest, most bound extreme, and everything between the extremes partaking in different degrees of the qualities of either extreme. Thus what you call physical

I get it. a bigger diagram?[large spiral, widest at top, narrowing as it descends:]

Unbound, non-form

Physical energy

Animated matter

Inanimate matter

“Black holes”

And I get, black holes aren’t the end of the story either.

They may be regarded as the release of matter at its most compressed. But let’s stick to what you can experience.

From the non-3D to inanimate matter is a descending spiral of increasing constriction. First you have an “external,” then as you descend you find the external more and more constricting. Humans still struggle; animals accept. Vegetables rely. Minerals exist. Imploded matter relinquishes form.

Rather than thinking of this constriction as punishment or misfortune – which it is not – think of it perhaps as swaddling clothes, providing security at the price of freedom of action, and bear in mind that swaddling clothes are not meant to be a permanent condition.

Thinking about this, I get that “the externalized part of ourselves” might just as well be stated, “the part of reality that we have assumed in incarnating at this time and place.”

Perfectly acceptable rephrasing. Once you realize that you are not the center of the universe for anyone but yourself, you see that it also cannot be so for your species in general or for anything short of everything. It is all one system and over-emphasizing the importance of any one part of it merely distorts it.

And that distortion is inevitable if we don’t conceive of the whole system.

You could put it that way.

I’m not sure this will be clear to anybody, but I’ll put it out there and we’ll see. Thanks.

One thought on “Spirals and freedom

  1. Animated matter > Inanimate matter

    Something clicked when I read that, correcting my sense of dualism or vitalism somewhat. Maybe not the main thrust of the article, but you never know what’s going to land.

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