The Interface: Emotions as interface

We ought to take care to get feedback, to see what people make of your explanations. I’m not quite sure why you need me to tell you what I would have assumed you know directly – mind to mind with them – but I gather that you do.

That is a remnant of your thinking that “The other side knows everything.”

We remind you that even where all is connected and where all is one, there remain differences and distinctions, and some things are nearer and some farther away. That’s just life.

“We aren’t jello over here,” you said once.

The simplest way for you to think of it is the idea of resonance. People respond easiest to those who are closest to them in vibration, and yet all products of 3D environment are mixtures of more than one note. That’s what it means, to be a compound being: We are the creatures of more than one strand of heredity, compounds far more complex than could arise outside of 3D conditions. Therefore some people who are very close in some ways will find great gaps between them in other ways.

So receiving feedback via 3D may have its advantages to you. Yes, I see that. It’s funny, I get your meaning and I get the import, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t get the statement of fact right.

That often happens, as a matter of fact, and as you will notice, it matters less than you might suppose. In this as in the rest of your life, you are following an emotional trail, not a thinking trail, so logic has less ability to steer you wrong.

People are going to find that a funny way of looking at things.

No doubt. But any way of living has advantages and disadvantages, and every trait is useful in some conditions and harmful in others. Logic would have been of no use to you in perceiving your way into unknown worlds. It comes of use when you attempt to describe what you have found, or perhaps where you are perplexed.

So as we proceed with our description of emotion as interface between personal and impersonal subjectivity, the more clearly we see where people are getting lost, the easier it will be to adjust our explanation. Everyone’s opinion of anything is the result of their previously prepared condition interacting with whatever new the new moment brings.

That’s a striking way of putting it. As striking as the ionized-air analogy.

It is the same analogy.

Well, that’s interesting. I wouldn’t have thought that.

The heat-shield/ionized layer/resisting atmosphere analogy is striking, dramatic, pictorial. But it doesn’t say anything more than is said when we point out that any new moment in a 3D life consists of the 3D individual mind encountering the “external” world. Bear in mind, a new moment is not always a re-entering spacecraft. It may be a campfire, a trusting infant, a walk with a dog, a spat – anything life provides. But the nature of the moment is always a (relatively) closed-in 3D consciousness encountering a seemingly external world that in fact is always reflecting to that consciousness sparks of itself. This has to be so, by definition, for you can only perceive that for which you have receptors, whether you are aware of having those receptors or not.

So now we invite you to consider emotions to be neither internal to you nor external, but, instead, the interface between the part of you that you know and the vastly larger part of you that you don’t know. And we remind you that several people working together have a much better chance of keeping this discussion practical than would any of you working alone.

This is a sort of step up to a new way of working, isn’t it?

Not new to the world, but new to you as a group, yes. At some point any group of sincere pioneers (searchers, you often call yourselves) moves from being many to being many-as-part-of-one. It is a natural stage of growth, and is, for instance, the unseen life at the heart of religious communities until deadness enters the core, which may be soon or not for many generations. Sooner or later the individual realizes that proceeding individually leads it to impassible boundaries that may be overcome, and pretty easily, by two or more working together. This is not a matter of mutual encouragement (though that may enter into it) but of, shall we say, an increase in leverage, an attainment of a broader understanding because attained from a platform broader than any one individual can provide. Carl Jung, as broad and as deep as he was, could not have probed as deeply nor as widely as he did, without so many people working with him.

And I get, between the lines, that neither he nor they necessarily understood the interactions in the way that a broader perspective might.

To them it may have looked like physician, patient; teacher, student; paterfamilias, dependents; colleagues; relatives; friends and townsmen; professional associates. And none of these appearances was wrong, only superficial next to what is really going on. You never really know  who you’re dealing with, or what they bring to the mix. Nor need you know, other than in a general way of appreciating everyone for what they bring.

This session seems like (feels like) a series of digressions.

Notice that it usually feels like that when you are expecting a certain direction and instead you get context or seemingly irrelevant or peripheral information.

True.

Sometimes it is more important to slow down than to speed up.

Why?

Because speed is a temptation to simplify, to omit, to streamline, to cut corners in many ways. Not the least damaging aspect is that if you don’t sometimes slow down to smell the flowers, you won’t understand flowers very fully. You’ll understand an idea of flowers.

I get the analogy of how bones grow in children; First added length, then a pause while width is added, then more length. Your prompting here, I take it.

It is a good image to keep in mind, in two ways. One, the extending and then the strengthening of the understanding you are acquiring. Two, the extending and then the strengthening of the skills you are acquiring. Of the two, the acquisition of skills is easily the more important, for yesterday’s understandings become merely a phase you went through (so to speak), while yesterday’s acquisition of skill becomes today’s firmly available resource.

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