The Interface: Change and evolution

When the 3D conscious mind has more than it can deal with in its accustomed routine, the potential exists for a break-through or a break-down, or either one followed by the other.

Herman Hesse moving into entirely new territory after his original talented but not particularly important early career was followed by breakdown, analysis by Carl Jung, and a new life. Jung himself, for that matter.

Yes, or people like Nietzsche, breaking down into psychosis after being unable to hold the higher voltage in fragile wiring, so to speak. And as you know, this is one function of a priesthood and a ritualized religion: to protect the unready from unmediated transcendent experience, while yet leaving the door open for those who can go through it. This is a balancing between chaos and stagnation, and of course there can be no “correct” position for one and all. Hence, so many religions and sects, corresponding to the emotional and intellectual needs of various individuals and kinds of individuals.

So let us proceed to look at the 3D conscious mind as it appears from outside. It is primarily an experience of limitation, as we have said. It is not that 3D consciousness is a triumph of rationality, fearlessly pushing back the curtains of ignorance and separation, etc. Neither is it “Mind inserting itself into matter.” It would be closer to describe it as a special case of the universal mind, functioning as if in isolation, functioning under a continuous pressure of lockstep movement (the ever-pressing living present moment) functioning under deliberately imposed limitation on connection, on making connection, on even maintaining itself in continuity.

This – as you may have noticed! – is hard. Life in 3D is not easy, and is not designed to be. It is by nature and by design and for a purpose, difficult. Even those around you who may seem to you to live easy lives are living their lives against limitations. They don’t find life easy, any more than you do. (Nor any less, however. No matter how hard anyone’s life is in one sector, it may be richly rewarding in another, and smooth as silk in a third.)

I get it. And I have long known that we can’t really judge anybody’s life, even our own, for lack of an independent place to stand from which to judge them. You told us that, 20 years ago nearly.

So what is the point of someone’s going to the trouble of setting up the 3D pressure cooker? You know it didn’t “just happen.”

You have said it allows for change in a way that the fluid non-3D conditions do not.

It does. It allows for the form of development that some people call evolution. But that word is loaded with 150 years of misconceptions, so we need to use it carefully. And it calls for a side-trail that may seem to be a digression.

There is a misconception called “progress” that distorts your society’s understanding. “Progress” implies movement from a lesser to a greater state, with or without setbacks. It pretends that there can be gain without corresponding loss.

I know what you are saying but if it is an unfamiliar thought, people may misinterpret. You have said that to produce something – an apple, say – it is necessary to suppress everything that is not apple. Only if we think that whatever we move to is better than where we have been do we consider “change” to be “progress.”

That’s right. A new society may be better in some ways than what preceded it – looked at from certain values – but it will necessarily lose some good things that were part of what was supplanted. From an outside point of view it isn’t “progress” to give up grapefruit in order to receive apple. It is change; it is choice; it is the creation of different possibilities: It is not gain without loss.

So, to see change as “evolution” may be entirely misleading. What looks like evolution from one viewing-point may look like devolution from another, or like random movement or chaotic breakdown from other viewing-points. So when we talk of the evolution of a particular bit of 3D mind, it is important that the semi-conscious ideas that associate with the word do not accompany and taint the discussion. That’s why we rarely use the word.

And similar words like “growth,” “development,” etc. have their own problems.

Of course. This is why we sometimes must go into wordy disquisitions: Sometimes in order to communicate something new, it is necessary to spell out what is not meant.

If we could depend upon your remembering the caveats every time we used the word “evolution” or even “development,” we would use them, for they do tend in the right direction. But, we can’t, so we don’t. Even “growth” implies a lot of things that aren’t so.

How about “alteration”?

Even such a word brings trouble in its wake. “Purposeful alteration,” or “Alteration driven by X and such,” and you are right back in the unconscious or semi-conscious acceptance of inevitable progress.

I see the problem. Yet, I don’t see how we can discuss our lives in 3D without the concept of purpose, and change, and choice, and distinction.

Exactly.

Well?

Well, perhaps you may intuit the situation by analogy. Historically you have had all sorts of societies: feudalism, capitalism, tribes, nation-states, empires, etc., etc. With time, one form changed to another – one way here, another way there, a third way somewhere else. What happened was change, not progress. Things evolved, if by evolution you mean the gradual growth of this in accordance with the decline of that. But the inhabitants of an older society may not see their supplanting by new forms as progress, and in fact it may not be “progress” in any objective sense because, again, any new advantage is apt to be accompanied by a corresponding disadvantage. In fact, the drawback is apt to be the advantage seen from a different viewpoint. “Progress” toward one thing is progress away from where it started.

And it is correspondingly so with 3D souls?

Long subject. For the moment let’s leave it at this: Just as societies change but don’t necessarily progress, so what we call 3D individuals. What is desirable today may be old news tomorrow. What is an achievement now may be a handicap tomorrow.

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