The Interface: Feelings, patterns, and possibilities

Continuing. Dirk’s first four questions:

[2-1) What are the purposes of emotion?

[2-2) What are the purposes of feelings?

[2-3) How do emotions and feelings relate to one another? Do they overlap?

[2-4) How do all of these together facilitate the connection between all-D and 3D and our greater purposes?]

We think we have answered this complex of questions, conceptually. If we have not done so, questions from your end will help us see what has not been communicated.

Well, I’m not sure you have explicitly dealt with the fourth question.

We would say that we have done so fairly clearly by implication, anyway, only as with the first two, we would reverse the underlying idea of purpose, and would say merely, this is what is connected to what else. It isn’t so much that they facilitate the connection, as that they result from the connection.

But there is the question of “our greater purposes.”

Again, not so much purpose as result. However, there is more excuse here than in the rest of the first four questions. The 3D was created for the purpose of facilitating certain developments, as we have said. So if we paraphrase the question, we can answer it. Let us say this: “How do emotions and feelings function to connect non-3D and 3D, or, better, how do they result from the connection of 3D and non-3D.”

Not sure that clarified much.

Perhaps we should begin clarifying before you can expect clarification.

Very funny. Okay, go ahead.

We have sketched the structure. Bullet points, perhaps:

  • The non-3D background to 3D is continually moving, changing, fluctuating, in the way your conscious and unconscious mental world does.
  • You as 3D constructs do not change automatically as the non-3D background changes. It is part of the point of 3D, after all, to insulate those fluctuations within it from the non-3D in general.
  • Nonetheless, you cannot be unaffected by the changes, and the difference between where the non-3D is (so to speak) and where you are, emotionally, is what you experience moment by moment.
  • Besides, there are two forces of change, (1) the ongoing changes in the non-3D, expressing in the 3D, and (2) the 3D changes that proceed from causes within the 3D.

I take that to mean, (1) The background changes: The winds change direction and speed; the weather manifests as storms or clearing or whatever. And (2) our lives in 3D produce enough changes even without considering causes from beyond the 3D world.

That’s correct. And feelings and emotions connect you with the non-3D world’s influence as the weather changes, and they express your own changes in response to those changes.

I think you mean, our reaction to events, whether caused by non-3D events, or 3D events, or a combination of the two.

In practice, everything is a combination of the two. But yes, that’s what we mean.

Now, let’s see if we can make clear what is after all conceptually a simple if unfamiliar way to see your lives as they are lived.

You are born into specific conditions that interact with your intrinsic makeup to produce your basic attitude toward life. Hence the value of horoscopes as roadmaps of the situation as it exists at birth. Someone reading your horoscope could not say what you will choose to do at any given time, but could see to a greater or lesser extent the range of possibilities, and the closed-off paths, which is in some ways more instructive. It shows the pattern you begin from, and a progressed chart shows the weather you encounter as you go along, and a chart of momentary transits shows what the influences are at any given moment.

That is to say, you are born into certain possibilities, which are a combination of the weather you are born into and the characteristics you bring in from the non-3D at your birth. This might be seen as your emotional starting-point, but we think it will be clearer if you see it as the source of your feelings, the genesis of your opinion of your life, so to speak. Do you trust life, distrust it, fluctuate between the two ends of the polarity? Those are feelings, not emotions. They are relatively permanent, or anyway very slow to change. They are your basic orientation, and seeing behind your orientation requires work, hard work. Ask any psychologist. No matter what happens to you in life, it happens against a relatively stable emotional background. That stability comes from the continuity of feelings.

However, life comes complete with many ups and downs, as you know. How you relate the present moment to your basic orientation is by means of emotions; highly labile, transient, of variable strength, intensity and duration.

I think it would be helpful if you would make up an example or two.

Fine. Your partner Bob Friedman was an initiator, an innovator, a pioneer. His basic attitude told him that he could affect the world, and so he had little or no internal friction to contend with when he considered doing something. Thus, he founded three publishing companies successively.

You, by contrast, live within a basic attitude that tells you that you cannot affect the world, or not easily, and so you face considerable infernal resistance when you think of doing something. Thus your life is very different.

Bob Friedman’s pioneering attitude left him somewhat impatient of the details of maintaining what he had brought into existence. (This is after all, the classic distinction between those who create an enterprise and those who maintain it. It is rare for one person to be equally good at both. In a sense, you could say it is because they come into the world seeing either one set of possibilities or another but not both. However, it isn’t that simple, nor is that the point here.) Your attitudes left you more interested in the functioning of an existing structure than in creating a new one, because you couldn’t see new possibilities as easily as he could . Thus you were more suited to adjusting the machinery than to causing it to come into existence.

This distinction between who you were because of your self-images that were formed of feelings; ultimately, you were what you had made yourselves by your choices originating from the stable platform constructed from your general attitude toward (and about) life.

Notice, the distinction says nothing direct about other personality characteristics. You had a quick temper and he did not. Necessarily? Well, yes and no. Your temper is a natural but not an inevitable concomitant to your basic attitude about the world. His relatively greater placidity reflects his basic attitude, in turn. But this was not ordained, and for that matter if it had been ordained, it could have been altered as second-tier effect of your, or his, reactions to events over time.

Thus, feelings. Examples of emotions will have to wait for another session, as this is your hour and more. And then we can proceed to the larger questions of how feelings and emotions relate to current events in your lives. “Current events” meaning, you realize, what is current at any moment of your lives, for you are always in the present moment; what happens around you is always “current events.” It is only later that in retrospect they may seem disconnected.

 

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