“An appropriate level of truth”

Monday August 8, 2016

5 a.m. can we return to the original point? Irrationality and today’s society and politics? Perhaps we never left it, I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem to me like we got very close to it yesterday.

You are stuck between generalities and specifics and you don’t know what to encourage. This is one of those situations being driven by your end of the polarity more than by the other end – and you don’t have a conceptual structure to accommodate it. So you hesitate. This doesn’t mean that every time you or we hesitate it is because you don’t know where to drive, but sometimes.

I thought that our part was to pose a question, or indicate a topic, and your part was to provide the guest speaker, to so say.

But it is not that simple. If I were to make a generalization about it, I should say that almost always, one’s working concepts are accurate enough to allow progress, but not so accurate as to reflect reality adequately. Our ideas are always in need of refinement. Your possibilities are bounded by your concepts, you see. If you believe in a wall, the wall exists for you until you cease to believe in it. It may never have occurred to you, but an appropriate level of truth is more useful to you than any theoretical absolute truth. To know too much too soon, or too much in the wrong way, can be not only not helpful, but disorienting or even misleading. We grow into the truth as we go along, and we shed former versions of the truth as they prove inadequate to our new growth.

Thoreau said something like that somewhere. You can’t expect a man to fit into the coat he wore as a child.

In recent months, Rita provided you with new concepts and perspectives that reinterpreted old ones. You were ready for them, having thoroughly lived the older structure, and you were willing to have past understandings overthrown. You were explicitly given the choice, remain or push onward. Either choice is acceptable, any time; it is your life, your decision. But that involves willingness. Willingness without readiness is not enough, so the choice was not offered until you were also ready. All right, so now your concepts of you on the 3D end and us on the non-3D end are to be upset as well.

Is this because for some reason it is easier to address theoreticals than to talk about our psychology and the elections?

It is because it is an opportunity to broaden your understanding of one of your prime areas of concentration, and we together prefer to pursue that than to shed light on what people will resist anyway, already knowing and resisting the knowing.

All right. So how is our present understanding inadequate? (I realize I’m setting myself up.)

At this point you think, “I am a soul living in 3D, responsible for a body and psyche functioning in 3D, yet connected integrally to the non-3D as well, with the potential to grow into greater awareness of non-3D realities.” Yes?

That sounds about right.

It is not wrong. It is useful, it offers a way forward. For many it is yet too much of a stretch; for some it is a comfortable fit, for others it is beginning to bind, or is perhaps long outgrown. We offer you the opportunity to become one of those for whom it has become outgrown and is ripe to be replaced. You are all in All-D. We have noted it and gone on to other things. It is time to look more closely at this.

You are all in All-D. In fact, “dimensions” are only a concept, a way of structuring data. There is, in a concrete sense, no height, depth, width, or duration. (When did you ever put “height” in a sack and carry it on your shoulders? It is an abstraction, a concept, and of course you know this, but look at it a little more carefully.) If height, depth, width are concepts, only, why are theoretical physicists trying to decide how many of these concepts are required to build a universe? In what way is a six-dimensional or twelve-dimensional universe (or a three-dimensional universe, for that matter) real? These concepts are as useful as, but no more real than, the square root of minus one. They enable mathematical representations of the world, but they do not in themselves represent reality. Or – one could say they represent reality; they reflect it; they suggest it. They are not real as the universe is real. They have no real existence, being only abstractions. Now you may say, this is only playing with words. We experience these abstractions every moment; they are part of our life. And we will say, no, you do not experience the abstractions but only the qualities that the abstractions have been invented to represent.

I used to say, “there is no France,” meaning that France as it is conceived is an abstract conception of a part of reality that we call France but is realer than any concept. Is this similar?

That was you, groping for this concept. Let us go slowly. Obviously we are not denying the existence of the qualities of your lives that make them possible. However, we are saying that as so often, they are not what they seem.

Dimensions are epicycles, so to speak?

Not a bad analogy. Fill people in when you transcribe this, but let us not pause now.

Epicycles were useful. They worked in practice. They provided concepts that allowed mathematical calculations. But in the very fact that they were useful, they misled, by seeming to demonstrate the correctness of the concept they supported. Similarly, dimensions.

[When astronomers believed that the earth, rather than the sun, was the center of the solar system, they observed that the planets proceeded in a straightforward manner, then every so often halted, reversed course, ran retrograde for a while, halted again and resumed their progress. (The earth was itself a moving platform, but since it was assumed to be unmoving, the other planets appeared to be reversing their movement periodically.)  Geocentric theory was wrong, but astronomers were able to  plot the courses of the planets with great accuracy, and were able to predict future movements with equal accuracy. Epicycles “saved the phenomena”; that is, they gave predictive value to observed data.]

Now, if dimensions are a concept, an abstraction, how can you be in one part of an abstraction and we in another and (besides that) you be stretched between both and we be able to appear sometimes and interact on your end?

When you put it that way, it is a bit less reasonable than it sounded.

Previous conceptions were bridges, as this one will be. To move from one shore to another, a bridge may be required. That doesn’t mean that the far shore is the end of your journey, but it does mean that it was easier to get there because the bridge existed. But if your path leads on, the previous bridge may be of no further use to you.

So now let’s look at things again. Instead of you in 3D in body with a  mind in non-3D connecting to the body through brain (and heart), let’s look at it in a more unified fashion. The difficulty will be in overcoming that spatial illusion that sneaks in on you and whispers, “that must be at some distance, great or small.”

Instead of a “space” in reality in which 3D is created and exists, let us remember that there are no divisions in reality. What you are accustomed to thinking of as dimensions, of real, tangible, actual, existing, obvious bounds and qualities, are real only in a sense. They are as real as you are, let’s put it that way, but no more so.

That almost makes sense to me. I have had three brief experiences that I remember in which I visited a “place” that is realer than this life. I was never able to stay long enough to do anything, but the undoubted fact that it was realer than this sank in immediately.

So you know that you are only in a relatively real “space,” and – let us suggest gently – are yourselves only relatively real.

Hmm, if this world is projected, then obviously dimensions are part of the projection. I hadn’t happened to put that together before.

Dimensions are conceptions about the projection, rather. But yes. They can be no realer than the “space” they seem to explain.

Well, you guys always manage to catch us off-guard, I’ll give you that. Let’s pause here, as it has been an hour, and take up where we left off some other time.

While you wait, ponder the non-reality of dimensions as a concept in an only relatively real reality, and follow where your fancy takes you, without feeling like you need to decide anything. You may surprise yourselves.

Okay. Till then.

11 a.m. shall we try again? No promises as to stamina, but we can try.

A new focus for your attention, you see, is the fact that there are various degrees of reality, just as you fleetingly experienced. Even this isn’t quite right; perhaps we should say differing degrees of intensity, of aliveness. It is too bad a physical analogy does not suggest itself.

I can think of one, but it is static rather than dynamic. A photocopy may be less sharp than the original, and a copy of the copy less sharp than the original copy, etc.

As you say, the example is static. However, perhaps it offers the beginnings of an image. If we can now find an analogy that is animated rather than static, perhaps we may marry the two.

Duplicates of films or videotapes?

Not really. They are static photos made to seem animated by being shown in sequence.

Perhaps analogies to coma, trance, sleep, awareness, hyper-alertness?

Better. In fact, together they may do. Go do other things and when we resume perhaps our lesson-plan will have been prepared.

Shades of Rita. Okay.

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