Remember that our purpose always isn’t to support or attack any given way of seeing things, but to express our way of seeing them. Remembering this will save you a great deal of internal friction.
Understood. Keep our eye on the information and let judgments about other ways of seeing things go, at least for the moment.
We don’t exactly mean don’t compare, but don’t keep score. And we have told you many times, don’t try to reconcile these ideas with what you already know. There comes a time for that, but not when you are attempting to see differently.
Now, consider that we showed you that there is no way possible for the 3D mind to experience the world by thought or logic or in any way consciously. It all comes in too fast, in too much volume, and so much of it is inexpressible in sequential terms, let alone logical order. You perceive the world unconsciously, then subconsciously, then consciously, then you make sense of it, or try to make sense of it.
And in this we are merely reprising the relation between non-3D and 3D.
Not so much reprising, as serving as an example of the two situations and their relationship. The 3D is to the non-3D as the conscious mind is to the subconscious mind: smaller, more focused, sharper because narrower.
Well, if from the point of view of 3D consciousness, one is always existing in a construct, close examination shows you that you cannot trust anything you think you know.
People who take psychoactive drugs in a certain way learn that. They see that life is deeper and more meaningful than it commonly looks to be. Similarly, people in certain disciplines, ecstatics of many kinds, even people subject to mental alterations due to long-term and/or intense illness.
In all these cases, and others that could be cited, something takes the individual out of the comfortable taken-for-granted view of life. Once you realize that your normal state of consciousness rests on a bed of nothingness, you begin to see that rationality may be essential to life, but it is not the basis of your experience of life.
By “a bed of nothingness,” I take it you mean what my brother once said, that they had examined a building’s foundations and found that an important beam “rested securely on a quarter inch of air.”
Exactly. And it is precisely on that quarter inch of air that any philosophy that sees rationality as the core of reality must rest. The unavoidable fact is that you never experience the world primarily, but only as it is interpreted for you by your own preceding mental and physical processes.
I read, years ago, that there is a delay of 1/30th of a second (I think it was) from the time something happens until it can be reported by the senses. I concluded that the gap explained why the inner world was one of undetermined possibility and self-evident aliveness, while the world as reported by the senses seemed determined and more or less dead.
And here you see why that is. Life comes at you continuously in this molten form, as unlimited potential, unshaped, undetermined, uncontrolled. It is experienced by, and processed by, your unconscious mind (that is, by the parts of your psyche that function outside your consciousness), and only then is it handed over to your consciousness. The subconscious has “made sense of” the world for you, and in so doing, has somewhat deadened it, truncated it, and made it seem to conform to whatever you had already concluded the world to be.
So what is the echo that your conscious mind receives?
I get the idea of what you meant, but those aren’t the best words to clothe it in. “Echo” is suggestive but not quite right.
No. Well, try this: Your conscious mind receives input in more than one way, simultaneously. The input it receives via the senses, modulated b subconscious processes, tells one story, but non-3D information (often called intuition, though that is not the only function intuition plays) may tell another slightly different story, sometimes significantly different. How is the mind to reconcile the two? If it cannot, you experience a form of cognitive dissonance, essentially being forced to try to believe in two or more things that may be not only not identical, but perhaps incompatible. But even if the mind is able to reconcile the two streams of incoming information (incoming opinions of reality, you might say), it may be able to do so only at the cost of falsification, of truncation, of dramatization.
The product of readjustment is what you experience as feeling, rarely as thought, never primarily as thought. That is, no one thinks their way to close perception of the world the subconscious filters out. “Thinking” is for making sense of things experienced. In a way, you could say that no one could think of something de novo, out of the blue. Always something happens.
Can’t we think of something in the way Einstein constructed his thought experiments?
You must have read or overheard something, if you are to think about it without having experienced it.
What about non-3D input rather than sensory?
[Pause.]
That’s a point. Very well, let’s leave it at this: Thinking is analysis, feeling is perception. A little too definite, but suggestive.
Sounds like “Thinking is left brain (sequential, logical, stepwise analysis and construction), and feeling is right-brain (gestalt, with its own sense of meaning that we sometimes call “emotional logic,” able to perceive without building laborious chains of associations, but fallible for that same reason.”
Again, a little too definite, but suggestive.
Earlier you said that feelings are our 3D interface with reality; something like that. I take it this is what you meant.
This is one aspect of what we meant, yes. It is impossible for a 3D mind (seen as if 3D only) to interact with the real world. At best it interacts with the world as its subconscious processes have decided it must be. At worst it has to try to make sense of subconscious reports that are so much affected by past interpretation as to be, in large part, lies. This is Hemingway in his later years, interpreting people’s behavior not as it was, but as seen through the distorting lens of his often-told personal mythologies. It is people clinging to obvious untruths because they cannot bear to see them as such. But even at best, the 3D mind, functioning in isolation, depends for the data upon the subconscious processes that are altering their reports to make them conform to the way the 3D mind prefers to see them. It is a very precarious way to experience life, and helps show why people’s beliefs can be so irrational.
People of all shades of opinion know that they (exclusively) are right, because how they make sense of the world tells them so. After all, nobody sets out to be deceived. It is in the suppression of contrary data that you all go wrong, and this is easier to do (unbeknown to yourselves, so to speak) to the extent that you listen only to thought and not also feelings. We know that seems contradicted by experience, but that is how it is. To explain this we will require a new session, for it is not a matter of a few words. The salient point is that experiencing multiple sources of inputs may result in serious emotional conflict. And that is very much worth looking at.