Thursday, June 16, 2016
2:30 a.m. So, sin.
Not sin, so much as a sense of sin. It is that sense of separation that is the illustrative thing here.
If you say so.
I do say so. We are not embarked in
[pause]
Start again?
Well, as I was ready to commence, it occurred to me that you aren’t really ready for this. You are willing, but you surely can feel that your mind is relatively sluggish.
Perhaps. Back to sleep?
Well, let’s see. Let’s try an experiment. If you will lie down and rest, as if you were getting ready to do a Monroe exercise, be willing to experience that sudden move into quiet that you experienced, only make it a calm and assured quiet rooted in deep relaxation, as though you had had enough sleep.
Meaning, I haven’t?
It is the kind of discussion that is useless. You will know, and then discussion will be unneeded. And if you were to happen to go to sleep, no harm done.
Okay, let’s see. (2:35)
(2:45) Well, that was remarkable, and I want to capture it if I can. Lying there, letting my thoughts drift – not thinking, really, but letting autonomous thoughts succeed themselves – after a while I felt that tide [of energy] coming in, and I realized why I had thought I was more awake than I really was: My mind was moving faster than my body, relatively, so it felt like I was ready to go. But in fact both were in need of rest. And maybe that is still true now – we’ll see soon enough – but it doesn’t feel like it.
One thought I wanted to be sure to keep – I value the way I do this, in writing, because it preserves a record of interaction that would disappear if it were only spoken. This method won’t work for everybody, I imagine, but that is one reason it works for me, not only habit but also the advantage of preserving the ephemeral process itself, no less than the substantive content.
I think I may take another bite of the apple, if possible. Not really fully awake. (2:35)
4:45 a.m. Dreamt about being in England, in a university library, I think. I didn’t really belong there, but I appreciated its being there. I wandered around, looking, not even tempted by the bookstore displays of large coffee-table books, too heavy for me to be carrying and bringing home. Something about changing money, too. Forms to fill out, very complicated. I realized I had some English money on me anyway.
Well, then?
Perhaps we can continue a bit. We’ll see. Nothing wrong with a day off, you know.
I know.
The dream you had relates to what we are about here. You don’t want to bring back something heavy, nor bring back what has already been published elaborately in the “Old World.” You aren’t really a scholar by disposition or credentials, and although you have respect for those who are, your own work proceeds along different paths. You can visit that world, but it is not your own chosen land. And as to the coin of the realm, the medium of exchange, you see how complex and cumbersome the official process of exchanging one system for another – and then (your summary of the rules stuffed into your pocket unread) you realize – or let yourself realize, let’s say – that you have quite a bit of the local currency in your pocket, which you brought with you from home.
Other parts of that dream, unmentioned, merely reinforce the point. You don’t really belong there, you can’t really work there, you don’t know how things are done there.
Can’t say I’m devastated by it. That’s an interesting and immediate dream analysis.
We can bring messages from near, you know, not only from far.
I’ll ty to remember.
Now, speaking of translations, and heavy tomes, and scholarship, and a sense of being alien – you will remember the school official who blocked your path at the foot of the marble stairway, wanting to know who you were – let’s return to the business at hand.
It is not sin, nor the concept of sin that concerns us here, but the significance of the fact – the psychic fact – that people experience a sense of sin. It is all mixed up with many things, and as we separate the strands it will come clearer. Doing this, we are more like Carl Jung, diagnosing and attempting to cure by encouraging the patient’s process, than like a scholar examining material for the sake of understanding in its own right.
In other words, we want to help people to help themselves, not just to produce a theoretical structure that may or may not be valid, but will go unread.
Not all of that. Some of it. No need to draw the dichotomy in such stark terms. Suffice it to say, this is self-analysis made easy.
Sounds like Brain Surgery Made Easy.
Perhaps, if we don’t do it right.
So let us begin to pick the subject apart, that we may relate it to our newer understandings of the human’s place in the All-D world, which includes your present experienced 3D world and your rather less well experienced non-3D world.
A sense of sin implies a recognition that things are not what they should be, that one is not as one should be. This is a valid intuition, of course, or it would not be so widespread in space and time, regardless of the fact that the specific content varies so that what is sin here is not there, and what is sin then, is not now but may become so again.
Just as we distinguished different things that were all covered by the same concept of “evil,” so we will have to look at various aspects of the word sin. For different psychologies, there are different aspects of sin. To put it another way, what is sin to one may be something quite different to another even within the same belief-system and within the same branch of the belief-system, for if the man is different, how can the situation be the same?
For some, to sin is to violate an explicit “external” code. To go against the Koran, the Ten Commandments, the laws of the Church – to follow one’s own inclination in contravention of a specific code is to sin. Surely that is clear enough.
But even within this most rigid of orthodoxies, there are degrees. Catholics recognize a distinction between Mortal and Venial Sins. That is, one kind of sin, unrepented, is a soul-killer, the other merely does damage, to one degree or another, but is not nearly as serious.
That isn’t the way it was explained to us, as I remember.
But you were children under instruction. If you had been taught in more sophisticated form, could you have understood it?
I wish somebody had tried. Maybe we could have.
You are overlooking a child’s need for a firm structure. In any case, that is one aspect of sin: God told me not to do it and I did it anyway. In secular terms, I broke the law (apprehended or not) and thereby did a bad thing. You may wish to think of this conception of sin as the law in its social aspect.
By which, I take it, you mean that the sense of sin comes not from the act itself but from the fact that this act was forbidden and the prohibition was transgressed.
Close enough. The very fact that it was prohibited made it wrong, and the very fact that you contravened it made you wrong. At best, you might find extenuating circumstances, but really that would be just begging for mercy. You did wrong because it was prohibited and you did it. There is no thought of the intrinsic evil (or perhaps lack of evil!) of the deed. It is the breaking of the code, the disobedience to the law, that is to be punished.
A lot of this attitude has gone into our police state, where something is considered wrong because it is forbidden, rather than being forbidden because it is wrong.
Would you expect that a psychology would express one way in religious matters (human / God) and a different way in social matters (human / human)?
I suppose not.
Very well. This is one source of that sense of sin, and we will stop here because you already have a lot to transcribe, and we do not intend to rush through this. But remember our purpose: We are not starting a religion nor critiquing old ones. We are examining this aspect of reality for what it will show us when seen in our revised context for 3D and non-3D life. The psychic fact of a sense of sin will shed light on the human relationship to the larger being of which it is a part – but it won’t shed very helpful light if we allow ourselves to examine it in cursory fashion because we imagine that we already know what we will find.
Understood. Okay, till next time.