Only Somewhat Real: Ideas and truth

Wednesday, November 8, 2017

Ideas and individuals

My friend Jim sees human suffering as being designed by non-physical powers to cause suffering so as to produce what Bob Monroe called Loosh, which can be used by these beings for their own purposes. Everything you have said that I take as evidence of our interaction, he seems to take as evidence of our being manipulated for the benefit of others. I think this is a fair summary of his position.

And your part in it?

I’d like to show him that that isn’t how I experience it, but words are so clumsy that we all attach our own meanings to what we read. Plus, I have come to see that there isn’t really any persuading anybody about anything. As you have pointed out, words are sparks, not law.

So, where is the problem?

Yeah, I know. He has a different view of things and so what? But I can’t help thinking if I can’t say anything helpful, still maybe you can.

But why would we want to do that? If his life has led him to his own conclusions, presumably there is a reason for it.

[!] There ought to be a way to show the “this-then-this-then-this” process that happens somehow. We need some kind of super exclamation point, to show when we experience a fast concatenation of realizations.

Lacking that, center, slow down, and trace them out, not trying to reproduce the sequence, only to sketch where you came to.

Well, when you said that, I connected several insights, each of which led instantly – faster than memory could record – to new ones. It was nearly instant, didn’t take more than a flash, but reoriented several previously unconnected ideas.

  • We don’t come to our ideas without a reason.
  • Our ideas express our own psychic realities; they are not really data-driven.
  • They are necessary to our overall development; they cannot be accidental or irrelevant.
  • Our lives are not meant as expressions of some ultimate or abstract truth, but as expressions of who and what we are. As part of that, we entertain only the ideas we can and (one might almost say) should, ought to, entertain.

Now why do you suppose a simple question would realign all that?

Because I was ready, I suppose, and your rhetorical question – not so rhetorical, I guess – sparked it.

And that is all you can do, need ever do, should ever do. Your ideas, your ways of seeing the world, your prejudices, your hunches, your unreasoning or seemingly baseless certainties, are all part of you, and you embody them for a reason. No ideas are better than any other ideas for a given person.

I think you mean that for any given person, some ideas are going to seem right and others wrong. So there’s no judging another person’s ideas without in effect judging the person – and we have been told for years that we never have the data to judge anyone else, or even ourselves. We are here to express what we are, and of course our ideas are part of that expression.

Correct so far.

Whether our ideas are more accurate or less is something we also can’t guess, because we don’t have that data either. A heliocentric view of the solar system is right in terms of physics and a geocentric one is right in terms of psychology, say.

I think you will find, when you look at it, that most of your social and ideological and political problems stem from the idea that there is a right and a wrong, a correct and an incorrect, and everybody and his position should be judged by how closely their position agrees with somebody’s idea of what is right. Since everybody’s ideas are different, anything other than “live and let live” – which is itself an idea – leads to chaos, which is what you are experiencing. (This ignores, for simplicity of statement, complicating factors such as greed, manipulation, etc., but they too stem from what people are, both individually and in packs.)

I can sort of see it. This assumption that there is one truth leads to assumptions that (of course) wherever we are is nearer the truth than anybody else, or we would move. And, it invalidates other ideas, hence invalidates other people themselves who hold these ideas.

Well, isn’t that what you see all around you?

It is, for sure, particularly in the poor excuse for a country that used to be America. Liberals and conservatives are tearing it to pieces in the name of fighting to preserve it. I have been saying for months that they’re all crazy, acting identically only around different ideas. But I hadn’t thought, until now, to see that it is fueled by each side feeling that the other side is invalidating them as what they are. Obvious, once I see it, but it wasn’t obvious before.

Reconciling beliefs

And this leaves you in something of a dilemma. By nature, you are going to believe in some things. You couldn’t function without beliefs. (Sartre lived on his belief that belief was meaningless.) Naturally you want to defend those beliefs, or, at minimum, live by them, as best you can. So how can you at the same time live your beliefs – in tolerance, say, or in everyone’s right to life, or in freedom of action, or in the value of community – and at the same time respect the beliefs of others that may be directly contradictory, especially if those “others” place no value on tolerance or “live and let live”?

In any dilemma, remember context. Dilemmas, like paradoxes, always resolve at a higher level and – like contradictions, usually – only at a higher level. So here, you need to remember (a) you exist beyond 3D limitations, (b) the 3D plane is only somewhat real, but is somewhat real, (c) no accidents, no coincidence, no ultimate separation; that is, everything is one.

That is almost too concise, and could do with some unpacking.

Feel free. We will assist, if necessary.

I guess your first point means, whatever we manifest in 3D, it stems from our All-D being, which implies a greater awareness. I’m not sure how this applies.

It has many ramifications. Who you are connects to who you are not just in this one lifetime, but to “past lives” in all their ramifications. Your actions and thought are less under your conscious 3D control than you sometimes think, because what psychologists call “unconscious” content – and we might call beyond-your-3D-only content – often puts in its oar. This isn’t interference by some “other” – in that it is part of you, after all – but it may frequently seem so.

Your second point, I take it, is that what we do here does have consequences, but at the same time isn’t the whole story. We can’t ever see the whole show, for reasons we’ve gone into more than once.

That’s right; and it also means that the rights and wrongs of a situation look different when seen from a longer or deeper perspective.

And I guess your third point is merely that we have to try to remember and keep real to ourselves the fact that “us v. other” is at most a relative distinction.

And there’s your hour. Notice, we used your question as a starting-point to make points of our own. Nothing wrong with proceeding that way.

Nothing at all. Okay, thanks.

Implications

As I think about it, the implications of this morning’s material keep growing, and the actual change (in ideas) required is less. All it amounts to is seeing ideas differently, but that changes everything it touches, which means, our entire 3D existence. You gentlemen care to help me out on this? Care to trace the logic?

It isn’t so much logic as it is relationship. If ideas are abstractly right or wrong according to some absolute standard, then anyone and everyone – not least, one’s own self – may safely be judged by how far their ideas diverge from the truth. But this is much the same as postulating an absolute standard of morality.

I certainly know what that is like! My own background and childhood (and therefore my unconscious thoughts to this day, probably) were formed within the Catholic Church (interesting that I started to write “Catholic Christ”) of the 1940s and 50s. There is no more absolute standard than that, maybe. With time I lost my resentment and came to see the advantages of such a background, but I never questioned the existence of an absolute standard of good and evil, only the human error involved in comprehending and applying it.

Meaning, you agreed with some Church doctrine and disagreed with other.

That’s what it amounted to, yes. I went my own way, trying to use my own thought and judgment (in practice, my own feelings), but I did not ever question that there was some such absolute. Even when I came to see that situational ethics were not only defensible but inevitable, I didn’t doubt that the issue was our adapting that inner code to specific 3D circumstances. In other words, who would want to adhere to the accepted code of Tudor England, or Ancient Greece or Rome, or Tsarist or Stalinist Russia? In socially accepted codes there could be no firm anchor. (I don’t think I’m putting this as well as you might, as I’m having to write and think at the same time.) Yet it seemed clear that in adapting our behavior to the time, we were still doing so in reference to an absolute that I would now say came out of the non-3D, or let’s say, simply, from our All-D awareness rather than our specifically 3D-bounded awareness.

And if there is no such absolute standard? Yet, how can that be?

I don’t know yet. I’m feeling my way toward an answer. That’s why I called you-all in.

If there is a universal, there are degrees of error in perceiving it, in living it, in attempting to comply with it (which, in short, quickly becomes attempting to enforce it). You can see this in the history of every society, every church, every association. Scientists are as prone to it as priests are, perhaps even more so in that they admit no mechanism for repentance and absolution.

It boils down to, this is the ultimate result of eating of the fruit of the tree of perceiving things as good or evil. In other words, 3D Theater, as I used to call it, is inherently partial, partisan, relatively intolerant, uneasy, even, in a sense, hysterical. (And I don’t mean funny!)

That may be stretching it a little. Yes, it may tend that way; it needn’t stay there. As you change perceptions, you change your reality, just as you have been told more than once.

We can undo the effects of the descent into perceived duality? Is that what you mean?

You can’t do it for others; you can perhaps do it for yourself and – as you would put it – leave a trail of bread crumbs for others. After all, think how many, many loaves of bread have been crumbled to bring you (plural) to this point. The work of realigning your perceptions won’t get done automatically; you need to work the problem that is your life. But it can be done; you have vast supportive forces of which you are usually unaware, some of which you will never be aware of. But it can be done. Only – don’t then judge those whose path leads in other directions! To judge them would be a demonstration that you haven’t yet changed directions yourselves.

This has moved a long way from my initial perception, which was that we can look at other people’s opinions as an indicator of where they are, rather than where they ought to be.

Not so far, just in a direction you didn’t expect. Now go do other things.

 

 

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