Ready to resume, but for some reason it feels like a long time has elapsed since yesterday’s session.
That is because emotionally, it has. You don’t quite realize it, nor why it is so, and conveniently enough, it fits right in with our discussion. Isn’t that amazing?
Yesterday you saw the video of the wildfires in the course of your group meeting. That is, you saw an upsetting thing while actively linked first with Dirk, then with Dirk and Bill, then gradually with nearly a dozen people. You are always linked in 3D (though it may not be apparent) but this was a conscious link. It is the equivalent of networking computers as opposed to several computers functioning simultaneously but autonomously.
I see. I don’t look at the news even on the computer, not as a regular thing, so I wasn’t really aware of the fires, and certainly wasn’t aware in the second-hand way that is sensory evidence. It was a shock. A view from space (presumably) of hundreds of miles of smoke pouring off the land and extending far out to sea –
Yes. Your emotion choked you.
Did it? I felt so sad, so upset. It felt like it has when someone close to me has died.
Can you not see the analogy to how you feel when you see something in its historical perspective, and you feel where it is going?
I do.
All this is directly appropriate to our discussion, you see. Something experiential, immediate, transformative (or perhaps we should say emotionally engaging) will bring life to a discussion in a way that abstract exposition never can.
- At the level of the vast impersonal forces in and of themselves, there is impetus. There is raw power, sheer potential. There is change. Potential energy waiting to manifest as kinetic energy, you might say.
- These forces are not unvarying. Like everything else in the universe, thy ebb and flow, they build and release and gradually build again. Every moment in life is different.
- These forces as they are expressed in 3D interact with existing 3D conditions, obviously. They don’t form those conditions, but manifest into them. You might say, “It isn’t the fault of the forces, what they find.” Rain per se (to use a different example) cannot be faulted for falling on ground that is already soggy: The rain (the forces as they express) is not responsible for the playing-field onto which it expresses.
- Neither is it in any way fixed and determined, how forces will flow. Like water seeking its own level, the forces manifest into what exists – but what exists is not inevitable nor pre-determined. What exists has the same freedom to choose its manifestation that you do in your individual lives. Indeed, that’s the point of 3D existence.
- As we said earlier, forces may manifest through human or through (seemingly) inanimate channels. The “earthquakes v. war” example was well founded. Human choice makes the difference as will be obvious once you remember in this context what is described as the psychic nature of “objective” 3D reality.
Yes, I see. Even I have forgotten (in this context) what has become second nature to my thought: All reality is one thing, conscious and interactive, and all 3D reality is — what did you call it? – shared subjectivity. Once I see it in that context, the artificiality that seems to inhere in the concept of human v. natural manifestations disappears.
Excellent. So then you see that other things follow.
- Life is always seemingly unfair in specific, never really unfair either specifically or as a whole.
- Human choice matters; it has consequences.
- There can be no such thing as meaningless coincidence, nor unmerited reward or suffering. Indeed, the concept of reward or suffering is only illusory, however persuasive.
- Have the world you want! Only remember, the concept of “what you want” is more complex than you commonly suppose, because it always involves layers of cause and effect well beyond 3D consciousness – and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Now, you, Frank, look at visual illustration of vast forces manifesting and you are filled with sorrow. Why?
I expect you are going to tell us, beyond the obvious.
There is no telling what is “obvious.” The obvious to one is not even probable to another. That’s why we are always filling in the tacitly assumed background. Tell us what you do know about what you felt – not only what you knew then but what you know now while we are closely linked.
I hated to see the destruction. I like fire, always have, and I have never shrunk from destruction per se. It’s part of life. But the sheer scale of it, it felt like watching the world burn. I guess it fed into my continuing sense that this life-sustaining garden is being destroyed. Conceptually I have been thinking, for decades now, that we are turning the green Earth into a ruined desert like Mars. This was seeing it.
And? There’s more.
I guess having people there makes it more urgent: my brother and his family, Dirk, Dave and so many people that they stand in for.
And?
It’s all so unnecessary! Like all the other wrong turnings I have been watching, all these many decades. I don’t say that is a balanced judgment, but it was a strong feeling.
All right. So now let’s look at this as example, bearing in mind that it is one example among thousands of millions that exist.
I think I see what you’re going to do. Interesting.
The forces exist. So you might say, on one level, the vast impersonal forces have released energy into the world as this specific manifestation. The energies had to release, and, releasing into the conditions they found, the fires resulted. It could have been otherwise but in this reality, the fires are the resulting situation.
Anyone in 3D sees the fires. But how many of you see the fires as the result of the same forces? Some will believe it was natural (hence, they assume, non-conscious, inanimate forces manifesting). Others may intuit that there is a connection, though they have no really robust intellectual model of how it can be so. Some may say it is God’s will (that is, it can’t be understood) or that it is God’s judgment on human activity, each one providing a different set of presumably condemned behaviors. (This way of thinking is actually closer to yours, and ours, in many ways than is the mindset that assumes coincidence and assumes the mindless collision of inanimate forces.) Some will trace physical collision of cause and effect, drawing ecological and/or societal conclusions.
The point is that although the manifestation (the fire) is one, the interpretations of the fire are many, and this is before we consider individual reactions to specifics. We mean, everyone brings to its understanding of an event the worldview it has created to date. How else could it be? Therefore, no event appears to be the same in essence, let alone in meaning, to any two people. There is broad overlap, or you couldn’t live together in the world, but still, you’re each experiencing something a little different, no matter that it itself is not different.
Aren’t you saying that we each pick up different aspects of a whole that none of us can grasp entirely because it is beyond our capacity?
Yes, that’s a very good way to put it.
Your reaction to sudden sensory evidence of the ongoing destruction was your reaction. Others would have had reactions that might overlap but would not overlay exactly, because you are all leading different lives. So your emotions that followed from your witnessing an event are not universally shared, nor would they be even universally understood, because so much depends upon the way each one sees the world. But they were yours. You see? They were a sort of instant reading for you on where you were, vis a vis that reality.
The emotions were a sort of gauge?
We wouldn’t say that is their purpose, exactly, but they do serve to do that. Now if in the face of this example you were not clear on the difference between feelings and emotions, we would be at something of a loss.
Seems clear enough at the moment.
Very well. Perhaps next time will be a good time to look at the difference in worlds when you all experience it as single stations (relative to 3D) or as networked computers. Or maybe the moment will take us elsewhere. We’ll see.