The Interface: System analysis

At some point I suppose we’re going to have to anchor theoreticals with actuals. But that means exposing one’s innards.

It would do, yes.

Specifically, let’s talk about what is it when one runs out of road, emotionally. I could hide behind the lives of others – Hemingway most obviously – but that’s what it would amount to, hiding. When I was a boy I looked forward to life and thought I was going to do great things. As a young man I was bewildered because I couldn’t seem to find any path. After 40, the path seemed to open up in front of me, but in following it, it came to seem less path than self-created illusion. And now at the end of a long life I find mostly weariness of life, uncertainty about future prospects, and even weariness at the thought of further life to live.

What kind of life is that?

That is a better start than you may realize, for in its very one-sidedness, it shows how your feelings express and limit. It shows how you are led to accept the view as accurate that is merely projected through the lens of certain feelings. And it shows how little impact on your lives reason has, next to feeling.

Now, you will be inclined to cringe at putting this out into the world, and some may be inclined to cringe to read it. And why? Because such things are considered “private,” they are not to be shared except with priest or psychologist or soulmate. But in fact none of you is nearly unique. You don’t talk about things; that doesn’t mean you don’t experience them.

Surely you aren’t saying we all experience our lives the same way.

You aren’t subject to the same complex of feelings, no, but you all are subject to some complex of feelings, and that’s what we want to talk about. The human condition is not nearly rational; it is rationality trying to play catch-up with the results of your ionized air on re-entry, or your relatively smooth laminar flow of water as the canoe moves. In other words, it isn’t all drama but it is always seen through – and only through – the layer of feelings that interprets the inner and outer worlds.

So you as a boy have certain expectations of your life. You aren’t remembering – until we speak it, just now – but you spent those early years wondering what the rules really were. What habits should you form? Whose testimony about life could you trust? It wasn’t as conscious as it can be made to sound after the fact, but it was more conscious than people would have suspected, viewing the boy from outside.

The searching for an attitude was itself an attitude. Looking for some authority to follow was in itself a choice, though largely an unconscious one. You were being you: What determined the “you-ness” you were living?

Brought in from another life, I would have thought.

Well, tendencies may be, even habits. But they are brought into a life that is not what had been lived previously. There is the “you” who entered this 3D life, and the “external” conditions that had to be accommodated to. The interface between the two – the ionizing layer – was the feelings that became habitual in you, interpreting the world (interpreting life) to your relatively helpless or let’s say defenseless psyche. Long before you become able to think, you respond.

I see that.

And it keeps changing as your stages of life change you and as they bring you to new “external” circumstances. Understand, here, we aren’t telling you anything but what everybody knows from experience, but we’re trying to help you see it from a different angle, or how are you to understand our view on feelings and emotions and thought?

When sexual impulses awaken, or we should say during the course of their awakening, for it is a process rather than an event, again you face major adjustments. You as primary observer don’t seem to change, but the “external” world, in this case including your body and all its reactions, does seem to change. You have to readjust all over again, and the revolution may require months or years or decades.

When you enter the world beyond your family, again you perceive the change mostly as change of circumstance. The changes within yourself that you notice may seem to you to be, “obviously,” the result of adjustment to circumstance. Superficially considered, that is true. Looked at more closely, the distinction breaks down as to who is causing what.

As your life progresses and you find your place in it, you experience yourself as stable, usually, amid an environment that changes slowly or quickly, predictably or otherwise.

And when, looking back, it mostly looks unsatisfactory, or looks highly satisfactory, or – usually – some of each, again you are usually experiencing yourself-as-observer as a relatively stable, reliable platform.

Now, notice. You expressed your feelings about your life. We recast it as thought, as analysis. Which had to come first?

You can’t analyze what you haven’t had the experience of.

No. and that is how life in 3D proceeds. You-as-observer are thrown into a situation that continually changes. You (inner self) change; you (outer self; shared subjectivity; “external world”) change. Continually. (Even a continuance of situation may amount to a change, but we won’t pursue this.)

All your lives are you in reentry, minus the life-and-death drama of the analogy. You never live without the ionized layer of feelings between you-as-observer, or let’s say you-as-experiencer, and “what happens.” It couldn’t be done.

A confusion in thought may arise if you think the feelings or emotions must be connected with drama. They may be, but just as often, they are part of the invisible framework connecting you to the world. We are speaking in system terms, here. The system is:

  • You as pre-existing elements formed as a soul in a specific 3D time and place
  • The “external” world as the shared subjectivity of which you are a tiny part
  • The ionizing layer, the laminal flow, connecting the two, which is feeling

Just because you don’t know that you experience the world first through feelings, doesn’t mean it isn’t true. And just because you may have certain ideas of what feelings “feel like,” how they manifest, doesn’t mean that’s true either.

But here’s the thing: Feelings, moods, even emotions, are often transparent to you! They seem to be merely “the way it is.” You lose sight of the difference between “the way it is” and “the way you see it.”

Shall we extend the analogy? Reentering spacecraft would routinely lose communication with earth as the ionizing layer was formed by the heat of the interaction between spacecraft and atmosphere. We lose our sense of being connected too, it seems to me, and one of the reasons we do is the noise and chaos and sheer pervasiveness of the outside world.

Analogies are useful until stretched out of true. Hold this one loosely, and it will serve.

Now look. Your initial angst about your life, which amounts to a persistent suspicion that you largely wasted it. Our view of your life as an example of process. Do the two necessarily contradict each other, or are they complementary, neither being right or wrong, each shedding light on the other?

The thing we can’t say often enough is that all the work on your end and our end and on the part of anyone reading this is for the purpose of making a difference in your life, not merely of playing with ideas. We can’t say what you should do with all this – and wouldn’t if we could say – but we say, take it seriously or not at all.

One thought on “The Interface: System analysis

  1. It reminds me of thinking about doing an autobiography for my grandson–as a chronology, or one following the places I’ve lived, or the jobs I’ve had, or my own spiritual progression to connection. Which one would be the better legacy?
    Sure, I could try to combine them, too, and see what I got.

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