Monday, June 20, 2016
6:15 a.m. I awoke with the words “self realization,” and am tempted to say, “that’s what we’re doing,” only I realize I don’t know anything about what those words mean to those who use them. Well, friend, I presume you know where you want to go next.
Let us look a little bit about conflict during your 3D life, as it manifests the uneasy position you are in, being at once an individual (forging itself into a relative unity in the heat of a shared 3D existence) and a part of something greater (which may have purposes of its own for you).
I used the concept of sin as one approach to the subject but we are going to put that down for the moment, always well aware of people’s prickly resistance to anything they suspect of being “religious rather than spiritual.” Sin is one indicator of your situation, in the way a GPS or compass or radio beacon might be considered to be a means of realizing the need for course-correction. However, unlike a GPS or a radio beacon, the concept of sin has been so closely connected to “follow the rules, or else,” that many people have a hard time hearing about it.
So let’s look at internal conflict as an alternate indicator.
What does it mean to be self-divided? Obviously the phrase describes many different situations:
- Contradictions between comprising strands
- Conflict between what the individual wants to do and what it feels it should do
- Of the latter, the conflict may stem from “external” pressures such as society, law, responsibilities, etc.
- It may stem from one’s code that one attempts to live, which verges on the source of the sense of sin again.
This division isn’t working out very well, is it? I get the feeling you were expecting to lay out a sort of logical tree.
Doesn’t matter. A simpler way is to say that self-division may stem from internal tug-of-war or individual reluctance, or inability, to function in the way some “external” force mandates. Perhaps you can see that these are two ways of saying the same thing, and could not apply outside the specialized 3D conditions of isolation of consciousness from its surroundings.
Meaning, we experience “external” forces only in so far as they represent internal unconscious forces?
Hmm. This is difficult. It is hard for you to remember that “internal” and “external” are only ways of experiencing the same one undivided and indivisible reality. Language continually tempts you to experience them as separate. Even the act of correcting that misperception causes difficulties.
Well, I don’t know, I think I’m following you all right. Isn’t the “external” world –. Oh. Okay, go ahead.
Yes, that is the thing that is hardest to hold on to, right there. It is true that the “external” world serves to illumine hidden aspects of your “inner” world – your shadow in all its superior or inferior aspects – but it is not true that the external world is only a mirror. It has its own “objective” existence relative to any 3D being no matter how well that 3D being communicates with its non-3D aspects. You aren’t dreaming the world into being as an individual.
Whew, this is one of those moments like standing high upon a peak in Darien, not quite getting it but sensing we are so close to getting a major new way of understanding something.
Yes, and you are feeling a little breathless at the prospect of so much work ahead to apprehend and express it. But, little by little, you know.
I do know. But – this is going to be a real stitcher-together-of-concepts, I think. It’s going to really help.
That will depend upon me to get it across, and you to express it, and the reader to make the imaginative leap, but yes – and it’s funny, but I’m judging from your reaction – yes, I think this is going to work. Only don’t expect it to be a similar lightning-flash of illumination for one and all, even if we do get it across well. The reader remains an integral part of any equation attempting to illuminate.
That’s right. If we can’t get it across, we’ll blame them! 🙂
And if that doesn’t work, I can blame you.
Not while I’m holding the pen, you won’t.
No, you’ll blame yourself.
Anyway –
Can you express the half-insight that just took your breath away? I think you will find (in general) that doing the work of carefully expressing what you can say brings you closer to what at first you cannot say.
Well, it was when you said we aren’t dreaming the world as an individual. Your underlining led me to realize, as I know you meant it to, that we are dreaming the world as part of something larger, just as aboriginals of all places and times seem to know. But it’s way more than that, and I’m not sure I can get it.
One tiny piece at a time, and we will do the connecting manually, so to speak, if they don’t connect themselves in the process. (And, of course, we may prod from time to time.)
Okay, well, let’s see.
- We all know that the “external” world isn’t solid and material and external at all, but is a manifestation of consciousness like the rest of it. It isn’t like we were these pinpricks of life among dead matter, or of consciousness among unconscious or non-conscious things.
- We know that our hidden selves – our shadow elements – are brought to our attention by being manifested in what seems to us external circumstances.
- We know that there are as many “worlds,” or “realities,” as there are results of individual decisions, in other words an uncountable and in fact perhaps an unboundable number, and that we move among them by choosing.
- We know that we can affect the external world, either by choosing to be in a different version or by changing what we see – probably the former. But we know, equally, that the world (that is, reality) is intractable. It has inertia. It fights us. If you are born with asthma you cannot necessarily whisk it away by choosing to be elsewhere where you don’t have it. Yet we know that miracles happen, and we know something about the why and the how of miracles, enough to know that we don’t have them in enough of a right context to understand them.
- We know that we experience this life as if we were individual elements in isolation from others no matter how emotionally or intellectually close they may be. At the same time we experience self-division, and change, so we know we aren’t individual in the sense of being all and only one thing.
And here I run out of steam.
Bearing in mind that these are your knowns, and not necessarily shared by everyone, all right. So sink in, and ask, what excited you (starting from this viewpoint) about the connection you sense and half-realized.
Well, I go back a few pages, and I see that we were trying to reconcile internal and external and I got that the external world exists in its own right and at the same time it exists as part of us, or I should say we exist as part of it – and yet all the other aspects of it remain true, which means we are affected by it and affect it.
No, you are skating on the surface. What you just said can be interpreted as mere statement of the obvious. A materialist could say it. Sink in, a little. Don’t try to think, try to receive.
The external world as we experience it is the inner world of the larger being. Is that it?
It is closer. Remember, your starting place here is the connection between the individual per se and its existence as also part of the larger being. We moved from exploring the sense of sin as one evidence of the tensions of that dual citizenship.
Yes, and I got that the reason we can’t manipulate the outside world entirely is that it is bigger than us, and I’m now realizing that the exciting breakthrough concept is very hard to put into words, because the words are flat. They don’t seem to say anything very exciting. They sound obvious.
That is often the case. It is mostly a matter of saying the same words in different contexts until they come alive with meaning. At least, that’s our experience here, trying to get things across using language. It is far easier to get you to make a leap than to provide a way for others to do so in the absence of their own guidance.
Do you mean, it is up to them to connect to the material through their intuition? I was going to add an “or do you mean,” but it has vanished, so I suppose that’s what you meant.
We will work more with this. Don’t lose your memory of that view from Panama, stout Cortez.
Actually, it was Balboa. Keats got it wrong. But I will try to hold it. I can feel it vanishing in the light of day, though.
You got a glimpse. Intend to hold it. And we will see you next time, whenever that is.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Excerpt from “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” by John Keats:
“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eye
He stared at the Pacific – and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”