The Interface: Consciousness as friction 

Maybe we’ll make this a private session. I am pretty discouraged, as I look back on my life. In so many interactions with people, I see that I was misunderstood – and also that I misunderstood myself. There was a level of sincerity that I never approached. Or do I mean integrity? At a deep level, how sincere have I ever been? Meaning well, in a vague way, has always come naturally to me. But following through? Really engaging? If I had to say if my nature was warm or cold, I would be hard pressed to answer. It is all very unsatisfying.

So is my track record of interactions. Some people I have benefited, others I have probably injured, more by inadvertence than ever by design.

I don’t know what I’m asking for, but, something.

You must remember to distance yourself from your own ideas of who and what and why you are. Living a life is not the same thing as understanding it or directing it or conceptualizing it, and certainly it is not the same thing as criticizing it.

It looks like a record of futility, from here. I couldn’t even be good.

That is the sort of half-blind comment that is totally useless to you except in so far as it helps you understand others who make the same mistake. If your own internal biases do not allow you to properly record certain types of interactions and effects, how can you expect to be able to see your life in perspective?

Which leaves me just nowhere.

No, it leaves you at any given moment of the eternal present deciding what you want to be from here. In a way, your track record (anyone’s) would only blur your vision of what is available. It would say, “My life is X and such; it has no room for anything beyond these bounds; it is to be scored according to these measurements.” Plenty of people try to live like that – and that is a core of deadness.  When Jesus said, “I have come that you may have life more abundantly,” what he meant was that he came that people could learn to live in the moment, rather than to live according to past resolves, past ideas, past strictures. He meant to show them that living mostly automatically was not living, but existing, and that life could be far more.

Well, I have always experienced you as encouraging me (against the evidence, it often seemed), and I do appreciate the support.

Yes, but you aren’t valuing it properly. This is an instance in which the implied distancing between “you” and “us” misleads. Nobody lives among non-3D guides and friends and assistants and cheering sections and critics that are not in a very real way tied to the person they are. You “connect” with only that that reflects a part of you. So in effect, we in non-3D are, and only are, part of who you are, known to yourself or not.

Yes, so?

So, “encouraging you” is not the product of some well-wishing bystanders giving you the benefit of the doubt. It is not an ignorant assessment of what you are. If there is anyone who is ignorant of the true nature of a 3D individual, it is that individual itself. Most of what you are is hidden from you by circumstances. This is what makes 3D life so difficult, so rewarding, so potentially productive, so frustrating.

To which, a long sigh, and “Live in faith.”

You can’t say it doesn’t work for you. Certainly it works better than discouragement and bafflement.

I suppose so. I often enough wonder if it isn’t merely a sliding through life among the path of least resistance.

Oddly enough, it is just the reverse. The path of least resistance is to identify with whatever mood presents itself.

Are we using the same yardstick here? I’m talking about drifting.

You think drift and living in faith are synonyms or at least are similar paths, because both imply a letting go of the controls.

That’s how it feels at the moment, yes.

If you were drifting, do you think you’d be having this kind of conversation?

I don’t see why not, necessarily.

You have been told, and have absorbed, that “faith” and “doubt” is the same intermediate position between knowing and unknowing, and which aspect appears depends upon where you are viewing it from at the moment. So experiencing doubt is not necessarily departing from living in faith. It is, let’s say, a course-correction, or a position check to see if a course-correction is warranted.

But pray tell, if you are drifting, what do you need a course correction for? What would even raise the idea for you?

Seems to me you are arguing that living in faith and drifting are the same thing.

They could be, but it would require a pretty strenuous form of drifting! It would mean that whatever came your way, you would accept and attempt to integrate as part of an unbroken fabric. No “Woe is me.” No “I have sinned.” No resolutions for future amendment of conduct.

You want to know drifting? Drifting is taking for granted whatever your mental construction serves up in connection with “external” events. It means letting your mental robots, your moods, your scripts and mirrors and projections, color your reality, you not offering counterpoise to them. It means existing, not living.

I sort of see what you’re saying, only you haven’t quite said it.

Au contraire, we have said it loud and clearly. To the degree that you are conscious, you are alive. But consciousness is a sort of friction against the tide of inner and outer events. That’s what 3D was designed to provide, after all.

What’s that? Are we moving into new territory here?

The boundaries in your life between private and public are pretty well blurred, which means your own struggles are the grist your mill grinds. You do your agonizing somewhat in public and it helps you if only by turning a sense of futility into a lesson.

You make me sound like a public utility.

Your choice, of course, as it is everyone’s. Utility or futility, choose one.

But in any case this went from private to something to be shared. Not that I didn’t suspect it as I went along.

Next time we do a regular session, we can take up where we just left off: the 3D as the background allowing the friction of the “external” against the taken-for-granted internal.

But I will have to disseminate this one for future sessions to connect and make sense.

It is in keeping the discussion practical, grounded in experience, that any real enlightenment can be provided. If you lose some skin in the process, it may be uncomfortable, but it is scarcely important even to you, let alone to the greater picture.

No, I’m fine with that. Anything is better than uselessness and futility. Next time, then.

 

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