The Interface: Apprehending the world

We repeat, what sometimes looks like diversion or digression may merely illustrate parts of the context of the question that otherwise might be missed. Sometimes what is missed invalidates what is perceived, not because what is perceived is wrong, but because its importance cannot be properly weighted in the absence of what is missed. So taking a moment to consider why we are putting the word “external” in quotation marks does not bring us closer to the question at hand, but perhaps it does make it more likely that the picture you construct in your minds is less distorted.

Remember, as we go: This discussion aims at clarifying the human experience of being in 3D and non-3D at the same time; of being both connected and separate, aware and unaware, self-absorbed and at the same time representative. It does not confine itself to human life as normally considered, as if 3D were all, as if any one 3D life could exist without predecessors or extensions, as if the 3D could presumably be understood as if non-3D were non-existent or irrelevant.

It is because we need to keep this exploration bridging over worlds and concepts that are too often considered as if they had nothing to do with each other that our explanations take more time than might seem to be required, and range farther in context than might seem to be required.

Consider the previous two paragraphs. If you think, reading them, “All this does is unnecessarily prolong things,” you have our sympathy but not our agreement.

Someone said that all the equipment in a scientist’s laboratory is there merely to get him facing in the right direction. I have always taken your context-painting to be the equivalent. That, and your remarks on process. Yet I know that many people see both as digressions.

How are we to explain feelings and emotions if we do not show the web of relationships that create and sustain and alter them? So that is what we have been doing. Yes, they can be studied in isolation (though we doubt that those studying them that way realize that they are looking at them in isolation), but no tool is ever truly understood without an understanding of the tasks it is designed to serve, and the environment in which it is designed to function.

So you see, when we look at feelings as being a membrane between the non-3D and the 3D, or as between the larger being and the local 3D consciousness, or even as the fluctuating ratios of 3D awareness to changing non-3D background conditions, we describe them in an active, functional way.

The 3D soul is affected by:

  1. Fluctuations in the non-3D that are peculiar to the individual.
  2. Non-3D fluctuations not particular to any one soul, but with a larger, less personal significance. If the former point refers to a change in associated lives (“past lives”), say, this point refers to something huge, on the scale and nature of World War II.
  3. Fluctuations in the ongoing present-moment life. Today’s weather, so to speak.
  4. Relations between current conditions (and one’s attitudes toward current conditions) and what we might call one’s inherited attitudes – the emotional responses one came into the world with.

You see? All these factors, all the time. Your lives are not simple, and they are not single-purpose. They are not even separable (except artificially) into one strand at a time. Life comes at you relentlessly and overwhelmingly and mostly at a level beyond your comprehension. Yet you do not go under; you cope, you survive, you even enjoy and thrive. (None of which you could do if you were not being supported by your non-3D component, but then, without your non-3D component, you could not live in 3D at all.)

So in any given moment, what is the background, mostly unsuspected or at least not consciously experienced? Add up the four streams of experience we just listed, and realize that only the third is definitely experienced consciously. The fourth is experienced to the degree that one becomes aware of one’s psychological makeup and how it affects moment-by-moment perception. The first two may or may not be comprehended as possibilities, let alone understood to be realistic, let alone experienced.  Surely you see that your experience of life depends upon your experience (or your non-experience) of these four factors together and separately.

Well, that’s very clear to me, at least at the moment. Certainly I see that one’s level of insight into psychic process determines how one sees the world – and, in turn, how one sees the world helps determine how well and how deeply and how continuously one understands and experiences those psychic processes. It’s a reciprocating process.

You might mention, if only for the sake of clarity, that you are not meaning “psychic processes” to refer to ESP particularly, but rather to the processes of the psyche.

Yes, I suppose that was ambiguous.

Let us repeat, for emphasis that comes with a terse repetition of something originally given at greater length, because new: Your mental and physical life is continually affected by four overlapping streams of input:

  1. Your particular non-3D fluctuations.
  2. The non-3D fluctuations common to your time.
  3. The present moment’s “weather” as experienced as “external.”
  4. The present moment’s “weather” as it runs through your filter and is interpreted.

That’s pretty neat.

Well, it ought to expand the context of the discussion, anyway. Notice that so far we have no need to discuss logic, nor conscious thought, nor any of the constructions of the mind in its attempts to make sense of the world and influence one’s path through it. Obviously we are not pretending they do not exist or are not important – but, you see, they are not primary. Anyone attempting to analyze the world and one’s place in it by treating it as if logic and thought were primary rather than secondary will not succeed in understanding it very well. They will be constrained to cut out large portions of the human experience, and what they do describe will be only a weak caricature of life in its variety and richness.

These four streams of input must be dealt with mostly pre-consciously. The amount of data would be overwhelming; the nature of much of it would be too hard to grasp (because not sensory); the inter-connections would require models of greater complexity than most conscious minds could maintain. Here, you see, is where “primitive” peoples employ magic and superstition and also quite sophisticated forms of psychological understanding. They don’t reason, they experience, and they have developed techniques to relate these experiences to their ordinary lives. Or, let’s say, one difference is that to them it is all one ordinary life, and of course we concur in that judgment.

Now, what is pre-conscious interpretation of the world, if not feelings?

 

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