The moment of recognition

Saturday, June 20, 2020

[I awoke remembering two things from a dream: 1) The map is not the territory. 2) The hell with the map. I wrote it down, spent a few minutes reading Kenneth Whyte’s Herbert Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times. Within 10 minutes, I was moved to put down the book, and engage our friends.]

6:20 a.m. I felt, just now, something of what happens as I integrate new understandings of what happened at a moment in history (in this case, Herbert Hoover talking to the bankers in 1931 in Mellon’s quarters). Insight, please.

You are asking what goes on. You ought to be asking, as well, why and how it goes on. And if we can get it through, this we will answer.

The way you read history is the way anyone studies a subject that interests him. You acquire data, intuit a sketchy map of the territory, get more data, alter or fill in or scrap the initial map, as required, and continue until you run out of new material for the moment. But a series of aftershocks – or let’s say distant collisions – also ensues, as recent data leads to reconsideration of past judgments and in fact changes the cast of players and the narrative of what happened. As with any field of study, one day’s map is always tentative, porous, translucent, provisional. Even what is well known may look quite different when unexpected connections are made.

Model-making is only rarely de novo. Usually it amends previous maps. Even in revolutions of thought, the revolution has something it overturns. Your lives do not provide an unlimited supply of new subjects for you to consider. And by the way, the more subjects you consider, the more relatively shallow your comprehension has to be in light of the vital relationships.

I get that this is not to say, What we gain on the swings, we lose on the roundabouts.

No, but it is to say that comprehensiveness is the polar opposite of detail in depth, as you might suppose. The wider is the enemy of the deeper. Both have their proper place. It isn’t a case of “should.” But you can’t do it all; no one can, and there are always unplumbed depths just as there are always more lateral connections to be made.

That gives me a fleeting image of a lacework tracing, only not fragile like lacework, extending to connect many things. And an uncounted number of such tracings, each different.

That is a reasonable image not only of minds in 3D but also of our minds in non-3D. We may all be considered to be connectors, ourselves the lacework at the same time that we are the spinners of the lacework.

Like spiders spinning our web out of our own substance.

Good analogy.

Now, there is a moment of recognition when many tentatives resolve themselves into a greater abstraction. That’s what you just felt. There is a little “clunk” as the final piece reveals a structure. Only of course bear in mind, it is never “final” and it isn’t so much a structure as a dream.

I didn’t expect “dream.”

Well, your very life may be seen as a dream. Call a dream a temporary structure bridging impressions or emotions or understandings or imperatives. Isn’t that your life? Like your life, your maps are only somewhat real. Real, looked at a certain way, but, you are within that certain way, so take them for at least as real as you are!

So, remember that you are creator-gods by nature. That being so, creation is your most satisfying occupation.

Creation is not at all limited to the 3D material you work among. Creation is primarily mental – and by mental we mean not “3D-brain processing information and coming up with new patterns,” though it may be that. Neither do we mean, “Ideas as opposed to execution of ideas into material form.” Rather, we mean, “Shaping one’s reality by the placement of attention.” Thus, science, art, magic, religion, scholarship, handiwork, industrial planning, political and ideological movements and activities, teaching, anything. If you look at it as we do, you see that the “external life” you take as a given is a sort of shared subjectivity of which you are a miniscule but not negligible part. Your being – which includes your habits, your thoughts, your fantasies, your ideals, your understandings, your emotional and intellectual and personal connections – it all contributes, and it does so in the form of continual creation.

When you get a poem right, or you finish a sculpture or a painting or anything crafted with care and attention – that is, with love – you notice. Or (smiling) let’s say you notice, if you happen to notice yourself noticing. That’s what happened to you this morning. Something you read connected with other things you know and made a satisfying connection.

This despite the fact that I’d have to go back to the book and re-read what I stopped in the middle of, if I wanted to remember what I’d gotten. And (speaking from experience) probably I couldn’t get it even then.

Conscious awareness of a new dream-image completed is not required. The real effect is at a different level, by necessity mostly inaccessible to limited 3D-minds. But 3D consciousness is only the foam at the top of the wave. Don’t worry (ever) about what you don’t consciously remember. Pay attention instead, to the on-going work you do.

“Work” in this case not meaning any particular result, but process.

Yes. Pay attention to your lives as they pass. The summing-up will come in due time and in any case may be of less interest to you than the scenery you passed among, along the way.

You were going to try to tell us why and how something happens when we make a connection.

Haven’t we done so?

If I don’t get it, I’d say no, you haven’t.

A “tink” at a moment of achievement may be regarded as a hint, an encouragement, a sign that you did well. That’s the “why” of the feeling. The “how” could be described simply as that moment of recognition that Pirsig talked about [in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance] when you see Quality. As he said, you can’t define quality, but you know it when you see it. We don’t mind nudging you in the ribs occasionally to be sure you noticed.

Well, I’ll pass it around. Anything else you’d like to add?

A word of cheer for those who are blooming unseen. This kind of creation can’t be hidden where it counts, and none of it is wasted. Besides, that is where you find your satisfaction: Whatever reason could lead you to abandon it merely because it was not obvious in the vast shared subjectivity, as seen by 3D eyes?

Which is to say, All is well.

It’s always the case, so why not say it?

Thanks. Till next time, then.

 

3 thoughts on “The moment of recognition

  1. Thanks for (once again) candidly sharing your process. This one in particular is both validating and encouraging to my own process.

  2. Blooming unseen – beautiful. And so much better than rotting publicly. And yet, to not judge: the brain mechanism of hey, look here->everyone turning head in that direction – that is a neutral thing. Utilizing that to distract is another thing. But blooming unseen, like so many flowers. Sweet thought.

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