Only Somewhat Real: Connection and meaning

Friday, September 22, 2017

Is it germane for us to know who you are connecting with, in order to communicate?

Distracting, rather. It is always a temptation for people, making story. Let’s concentrate on the information. If the specifics of the arrangement become germane, they will emerge at that time. The task is a bit abstract, and that is always a problem, because it is so easy for people to wall off the abstract rather than apply it to their specific circumstances of the moment. We do not wish to help people construct one more ungrounded vision.

That’s my inclination, as well. I get awfully tired of people asserting that things are this way or that way, and laying down rules derived from their bald assertion. I try not to do that.

It is because we value that approach that we have from the beginning mixed procedure with assertion, so that you could test as you went along. Bear in mind, though, that your approach isn’t the only valid approach. There is a place for bald assertion and laying down rules. People differ and have differing needs.

Our present theme is that your 3D life is partly real and partly misunderstanding, or say misperception.

Willingness and circumstance

The sense we want to convey is that your 3D consciousness considered by itself has room to grow. What you are aware of can expand, depending upon willingness and circumstance.

Doesn’t it amount to saying, we can become aware of more of the content of our entire mind, rather than only the 3D-specific parts of it that we always have?

In a sense, yes. But there is more to it than that: willingness, circumstance. Willingness means you have to be able to deal with it, and you have to be able to do the dealing. Circumstance means, not all times are equally propitious. Carpe diem. Those who are willing to expand their everyday-life consciousness will of course find the propitious circumstances.

Of course?

Well, it isn’t as if you were stumbling around in the dark. It is not up to your 3D-delimited mind to find new opportunities; your greater mind, your All-D mind, call it (only don’t make the analogy into something solid), will always bring you what you need when you are able to make use of it. You can lead a 3D mind to water, but you can’t make it drink, so not every opportunity is taken. Nothing tragic about that, it’s just the way things are in 3D.

However, the counterbalancing factor is propitious times. Sometimes you have to wait. That’s a reason to use your opportunities when they become obvious to you, lest you miss the opportune moment and are forced by circumstance to wait. Again, it isn’t a tragedy, but it can be inconvenient. It is true that the world will bring you what you want, and that you can choose the reality you want to experience, but your own lives ought to tell you – the 3D reality of the lives you are all living at the moment ought to tell you – that of course it isn’t that simple.

Wrestling with the material

As always, you can’t get anything from the material (or from anything, really) if you merely accept it but don’t relate it to what you know by living it. So don’t just say, “Oh, yeah, create your own reality, I know all that, I don’t have any problem with this” – apply it! Ask yourselves, if it is true, why does my life contain what I don’t want as well as what I do? If it is true, how can what I live be true as well? And don’t settle for an evasion, an easy answer that answers only by explaining things away, but wrestle with it.

If you find it easy, you aren’t wrestling with it. That’s a pretty flat statement, but we’ll stand by it at least for now. You have to really look, to really see what it is you believe, and if you find that you believe two things that seem to contradict each other, you need to see if you can work out a sense in which they do not. The harder you work, the better the chance you will get something meaningful out of this.

I know you don’t mean “the harder you work” to mean it’s going to be necessarily unpleasant or tedious or even lengthy, but I thought we ought to make that clear.

No, we mean the more sincere effort you expend, naturally the better the prospects for a worthwhile outcome.

Life is expression

So, so much for procedure. We don’t want to leave it at that. Here is something substantive to chew on: All human activity expresses.

Expresses.

We said it that way purposely. It matters less (for the moment) what it expresses. Our point is that human life is expression; it is not an end in and of itself.

In the sense of an actor’s role being an expression of his craft?

We have to stop and think about that.

[Pause]

That [meaning, my suggestion] was an interesting reaction. Yes, not a bad analogy. Your 3D life is being acted, and you as actors are expressing as best you can within the limits of the role and within your own ability to play that role – and there is the nucleus of an essay in itself, the limits of your ability to play the role you are playing. So, the play is real in its own terms but is only a play in a larger context, as we have said.

Our role may include transcending the limits, but we can’t transcend the role.

That’s well put. Anything you do is possible, or you couldn’t do it. But nothing you do is out of character, because the character is what you make it.

Now, we have just said, in 3D you express. Express what? Clearly, the forces flowing though you. At least, we hope that is a “clearly.”

I think it should be. How could we express something that we didn’t have within us?

Having it does not mean being aware of having it, of course. But yes, that’s the sense of it.

Well, if you express what is flowing through you, can you safely disregard or define out of existence things like hatred, contempt, malice, oppression? Can you, in short, decide that the evil impulses you feel and that you see expressed around you do not exist? That they are “merely” something or other, something innocuous and unthreatening? Is that an honest assessment of the situation?

The same may be said of good, but to say it might lead misleadingly to self-congratulation and rose-colored glasses, so we begin with the consideration of what so many would wish to define out of existence, even while they continue to lock their cars, protect their person, and deplore the news.

Friday, September 22, 2017

Finding meaning

So let’s start with these forces that express through us. Where do they come from?

They exist. It may be better not to tempt yourselves to creating story. In a way, what does it matter where they come from? Anything you are told may or may not be true, but what you know is that you experience them. Start with what you know.

But – not even a general statement?

If you wish. Good and evil, and everything that is meant by the words, from the ultimate through to the mingled manifestations that puzzle your lives, are part of the fabric of existence. But does that really tell you anything?

It seems to tell me that they are not incidental, and I gather they are not peculiar to the 3D world, as we might be tempted to assume.

If you will associate ideas, you will see that that could not be so. The 3D world is part of the larger world you only imperfectly and intermittently perceive – so how could the forces of good and evil be particular only to the 3D and not at the same time, and necessarily, be part of the same All-D that includes 3D? It’s impossible. It is a confusion of ideas.

All right, I see that.

And as to “incidental” – what does that mean? Are they accidents? Unwanted side-effects? Illusions produced by inability to see clearly? Are they not pretty important, to be incidental?

I see your point. All right.

This is an absolutely major point. Your lives are not, and are not for the purposes, that you are accustomed to think them. That is one reason why to so many, life appears to be pointless. It is because the point is disbelieved, and no believable substitute can be established. You may seek for meaning in achievement, and find it hollow and unsatisfactory, even illusory, like Churchill in his old age.

Yes. His daughter, seeing him depressed on his birthday, said, “But you have accomplished so much!” He replied, “Yes, I have accomplished a great deal, to have accomplished nothing in the end.”

Neither is meaning found in the satisfaction of appetites or the recording of sensations. What is satisfying?

In my experience?

That is all you have to go on. Anything else is hearsay.

In my experience, the only things that are satisfying are the exercise of a skill and the assistance of someone.

And perhaps all the better if the one accompanies the other. So what does this tell you?

[Pause] Well, I suppose if we are made a certain way, whatever skills we can develop are expressions of our selves. Maybe that satisfaction is the opposite of the sense of wasting time. As to helping people, I don’t know. It fills some inner need; I don’t know to what extent it is universal.

Do the exercise of skill and the helping of people provide meaning to your life, as well as satisfaction?

I don’t know how to answer that. I’ll give you what the guys used to give me: Yes but no. Those activities are more meaningful than other things, but no, they aren’t enough. Is that what you mean?

What does provide meaning? Dig.

The closest I could come to it would be to say, the same thing that is an indicator that you have found your bliss, as Joseph Campbell would say – the things that you lose all sense of time while you are doing them. And that’s about the same two things, exercising skill and helping people.

Only, those are doings. What about beings?

 I see that I took your question to be about doing. Did I fall into a trap, there?

You illustrated a point, anyway. But what about how to be? Or, you might put it, what about an attitude toward life? How can you look at life so as to really feel its meaning? Not in theory, but in practice?

[Pause] I had to think about it. I guess I’d have to say, when I feel like I’m being employed for some purpose beyond me. This.

And what does that tell you?

Hmm. I suppose it is the opposite of feeling useless, or isolated, or without purpose.

Feeling connected, perhaps.

Yes, I suppose. Are you implying that the sense of connection is the reward? Is an indicator that we’re on the beam? Or what?

Draw your own implications, remembering that one size does not fit all. The point here is, what makes you feel most alive, most fulfilled, most – well, most real? Different people will get different answers, but we’ll say this: The answer you get will tell you more about your role and how to stretch or transcend your role than anything else could.

And this is another good place to pause.