The Interface: Feeling, not thought

After yesterday’s session, I wondered, is one of the roots of fanaticism arguing against one’s doubts? That is, could there be a connection between people’s self-division, due to their incorporating (embodying) contradictory beliefs, and the zeal with which they refuse to be open to argument from others? (That is, from the “external” world?)

But you said you were intending to describe how it is our listening to thought rather than feelings that leads us to suppress contradictory data and therefore come to erroneous opinions. At least, that is how I understood what you said.

Because emotions may well up from feelings or from situations, your age thinks that thought is more reliable. It values rationality not realizing that rationality is and must be rooted in non-rational processes. They consider the 3D human to be explainable as a thinking animal when in fact any thinking it does is tacked onto its feeling background.

But let us look at how your so-rational 3D minds process thought and feeling. This amounts to saying, Let us examine how your thinking thinks it makes sense of the world, when in fact, as we have pointed out, it rarely gets within a mile of the world. What it mostly processes is the world your unconscious process allows you to experience. Your unconscious and subconscious processes have produced a simplified version of the world that came at them: That’s all your conscious processes could handle. But if you are thinking about life through processes that have been simplified themselves, and you are considering only the facts that made it through the filters of which you are unconscious, and therefore cannot allow for, what kind of information can you expect to bring back?

It’s surprising we do as well as we do.

Who says you do well? You certainly don’t do well via conscious processing of data brought forth along 3D channels following your unconsciously applied rules of exclusion. If you could not receive input from your non-3D component, your position would be hopeless. And indeed, thinkers who consider the human condition only from a 3D viewpoint are frequently reduced to despair, for 3D evidence shows life to be meaningless, freedom illusory, and therefore anyone’s faith or anyone’s experience of “higher” things to be self-delusion.

Sartre, etc.

We don’t intend to hare off into criticism of literature or philosophy. We merely make the point that you could not live a satisfactory life in 3D if you had to accept only 3D facts, 3D processes, and 3D conclusions about the evidence produced by 3D facts and processes.

Now, to hone in a little:

  • Your 3D consciousness must make sense of the world on only indirect and incomplete evidence.
  • It has no way to know what facts and aspects of reality are being kept from it by pre-conscious processes.
  • Self-analysis will help; analysis with the assistance of a profession psychologist may help. Enough attention on the process as observed may yield insight into one’s biases. Certainly it will (or should, anyway) remove one’s certainty that one sees clearly.
  • Thought and feeling alike will reveal self-division, perhaps previously unsuspected. But we suggest that “self-division” is a misleading way to look at it.
  • Rather than experience yourselves as self-divided (which assumes one solid self as a default), consider yourselves self-multiplied, though that is not an elegant nor particularly useful term.

No, it isn’t, but I get the idea. We are not one mind, divided, but many minds, cooperating and learning to live together.

That’s the idea, yes. And you see, altering the model alters the expectations.

Sure. If we assume that multiplicity functioning together is the norm, we won’t experience it as if it were a pathological state.

  • Now, these cooperating strands to some extent live in different worlds. Or, put it this way, they represent, they originate in, different worlds, and yet there they are for your unconscious and subconscious processes to make sense of. What kind of result can be expected?
  • Yet, the incoming lack of cohesion is experienced not so much as contention among thought, as it is alternation or contention of feeling.
  • Moment by moment, your minds deal with the world as it comes at them: relentlessly, continuously, without explanation. How does your mind deal with it? How does it experience the changes each new moment may bring? By thought? No, by feeling. By mood, you might say. Different internal weather conditions bring to the fore different strands, and each strand, as it drives the boat, considers itself the only real you, and forgets the others. And you as observer of all these strands tend to forget or downplay the extent to which various strands are handing off to each other.

And as each successive mood takes us, we consider it the obvious rational response to conditions.

Of course you do. And it is only as you learn to distrust that “obvious” assumption that you begin to experience deeper levels of your true self.

I don’t think people have a very good grasp on what Jung meant by Self. I think they assume he meant, merely, that it is us getting into better touch with the same materials we experience as ego.

Self includes all of you, and by our definition extends beyond 3D in two directions: laterally, so to speak, to the sources of your various strands as they live their life in their own living present moment; and in depth, considering the larger being as part of you (or, really, you as part of it). We don’t intend to try to say what Jung meant by Self, but this is what we mean by it.

Now look at what a process of impossible reduction it is, for a 3D mind (an “ego” in the sense of a mind confined to only 3D resources) to try to even comprehend, let alone understand, a Self so much bigger and more aware and more sophisticated than itself. How could that be done by thought?

People will perhaps be inclined to say that’s what you and I are doing here.

That’s a matter of semantics. We are trying to analyze the situation abstractly. That isn’t at all the same thing as trying to drive the boat. The fact is, no one ever has or ever will run a 3D life by thinking. Life is lived by feeling, then by thinking. And this takes us to the subject of moods and how they are generated, and how they act as indicators and buffers as one living moment replaces the previous one. (At least, that’s how time seems, to you. it’s a misleading model, but we aren’t out to explain everything, so we’ll just throw out that thought in passing.)

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