Wednesday, January 20, 2021
7:40 a.m. The first inaugural address I ever listened to was John F. Kennedy’s. I was in D.C. for Jimmy Carter’s, in the crowd, listening. Two occasions of hope. All that idealism, all those good intentions, and you can hardly say they came to nothing, but they didn’t, because they couldn’t solve the underlying problems. Joe Biden’s won’t either, not the words, not the intentions, not the actions.
This isn’t being said with any clarity. Guys, help me say the underlying thought.
The 3D manifestation cannot reshape the 3D-and-non-3D situation.
Our actions don’t reshape our world?
Scratching the peel of the apple does not affect the apple’s weight, content, nutrition, ripeness –
Our actions are somewhat superficial, you are saying.
They are not what they appear to be, because the playing field is not what it appears to be, nor is the game, nor the game equipment. The score is not what you think, nor is the combat.
Ah yes. If we are looking at the world as a shared subjectivity rather than as a fixed “thing” with its own independent existence, the psychology of it comes to the fore and the independent “facts” recede.
As usual, not quite, but in that direction.
So then –
Well, whenever you live, however you spend your life, what you experience of the shared subjectivity is only that which has connections to you. That’s merely common sense. A Chinese woman in her mid-40s, a South African man in his teens, a Canadian, a European – they can hardly experience the world just the same way you do.
Clearly.
Yes, you say “clearly,” but think about it. To say that one experiences the “external world” differently because one lives in a different place, different times, different circumstances, etc., is to say one experiences only the share of the overall shared subjectivity that one has resonance to. It is the same statement, the same situation seen differently.
The significance of which is -?
Oh, one or two minor consequences: There can be no meaningless coincidences; all is one; the world is a safe place, just as Seth assured Jane and Rob; your personal choices matter to you, they matter therefore to the world; your real point of application is your work on yourself; reforming someone else is not possible and is often evasion.
Only that?
We’re smiling along with you. No, in fact, not only that, but that’s a beginning. Also: Failings, successes, achievements, are all the same – they are one person’s projections into the shared subjectivity.
Not clear to me; I know it won’t be clear to others.
You don’t know, actually. Some will get it by the usual sparked insight. But a little clarification won’t hurt anything.
You live your lives doing things. From your point of view, it is you interacting with the world. If you build a doghouse, it is you gathering the materials, manipulating and assembling them, and producing something that did not exist until you made it exist. This is true and nothing wrong with seeing it that way, but from our point of view, the 3D doghouse is less real and is certainly less to the point than the process that built it. That is, your decisions weigh more with us than the execution of the decision.
You mean, I think, our deciding to build the doghouse, and our actions in doing so (mental or physical) are realer to you than the 3D doghouse.
Fast-forward a century or so. Which is more likely to still seem real, the process or the doghouse? How real are the cows Emerson led to and from the Boston Common, or the trees he tended in his orchard, as opposed to what he became as he lived these things?
I thought you were going to say, as opposed to the essays he wrote and the lectures he delivered.
No, that would be comparing one set of works to another. That’s a valid comparison in itself, but not the one we are drawing. Your lives are your life’s work, and not the particular way in which they manifest.
How we do, more than what we do.
Close enough, but what you do is how you do.
However, to revert to my starting-point, you couldn’t say any actions are as good as any other, nor that any decisions are as good as any other. Choices matter, do they not? If they matter for us as individuals, don’t they have to matter to us in society?
Let’s put it this way. How could you or anyone ever experience underserved consequences?
I often wondered why I was made to live in the world in which John F. Kennedy had been murdered.
Of course, or why World War II had happened, or why so many million people were deliberately and systematically slaughtered by Nazis and Communists in the name of building a better world. But where do you end that? Would you live only in a world where everything was to suit your desires? No poverty, no racism, no disease?
I see your point. It’s longing for an impossible perfection.
No. It is longing for you as you are (at whatever time) to fit into an ideal world. But are you an ideal person?
I begin to see it. It takes a bodhisattva to live in a perfect world.
You have the feel of it, but not yet the shape of it. The bodhisattva is specifically suited for an imperfect world. What need would a perfect world have for bodhisattvas? But your underlying glimpse was correct: If the external world is part of you and you are an uncompleted creation, put it that way, what part could you have in an environment that had no place for you?
We use all these words, and I don’t know if it is coming any clearer.
“You do the best you can.”
Choose what you want to be, what values you want to uphold, and live that. And if your choices include greater openness, “life more abundantly,” do what leads in that direction. If you decide to trust life—and we highly recommend that you at least try it! – then do not shrink from what comes just because you may not like it.
It really is that simple.
Well, I can see that I am a very different man because I invested in JFK so totally and then had to live a long life in the shadow of his death. (I started to say, “his unavenged death,” then thought, “What difference would justice have made, he was still dead.”) Not anything I in 3D – especially at 17 – would have chosen, but a life nonetheless.
Probably the people who lived through World War II didn’t like it much either. That doesn’t mean it didn’t serve them.
“And enough for now.”
And enough for now, indeed. Thanks you as always for listening.
And thank you as always for your explanations. Till next time, if there is one.