The Interface: Speed and texture

I thought, last night, peculiarities as example. The things that make us different. But you may prefer to begin elsewhere.

Considering your innate differences may serve; we’ll see how it goes. Considering prejudice and obsession worked well enough. The overall idea is to replace judgment with understanding. There are reasons why people see the world differently and act differently. It isn’t just people being perverse. And indeed if it were, you’d still have to explain why they felt like being perverse.

I get that you are correlating on the one hand our lives as we lead them individually, and on the other hand why we lead them that way.

Overall, yes. How can we understand the world and your place in the world if we do not consider them together? But to do that, we need to look at the interface between two streams of data, and that is the boundary layer. Call that layer feelings or call it something else, it is the key to seeing yourselves as part of the world, not as merely rattling around loosely in it.

I am aware as I write this of bits of feeling from the movie “The Two Popes,” that I watched again recently. It is background, not grasped and not at all central, but there somehow. I can’t really believe in fortuitous juxtaposition, but I don’t see the point.

Even noticing it, and, better, noticing it and mentioning it, shows increased apprehension. “Apprehension” not in the sense of worry, but in the sense of grasping. And you will find that the more you notice and pay attention to, the wider your span of attention becomes. The result may be hard to control for a bit, but the result will be well worth it. Wider consciousness comes at the price of a certain confusion, sometimes, but you get used to it.

That isn’t what I had in mind when I thought of higher consciousness, or greater awareness.

No, but you should expect that reality will never be exactly the way you envisioned it when you were envisioning without the experience of it.

So, as an example for us, how does half-thinking about “The Two Popes” while writing about feelings as the interface between our personal life and our interaction with the world serve us?

That isn’t quite the correct question. But even as you phrased it, the relationship ought to be obvious.

Yes, I guess it is. One pope was intellectual, judgmental, inclined to steer life; the other was more human, more accepting, more inclined to learn from life. At least, that’s one way you could see it. Each was idealistic and the idealism is what they had in common; but how they saw and experienced the world – the non-3D as well as the 3D world – is what is illustrative.

So as we provided a line of attack, your larger mind provided an illustration that broadened your application and understanding of the point – only, you had to be able to hear, if you were to respond.

And of course it becomes impossible to continue in a straight-line course, if we attempt to relate various levels of thought and association while maintaining a narrative.

Here you need to consider: You must speed up and slow down at the same time. This is not paradox, nor internal contradiction. It is an attempt to describe an unfamiliar set of relationships.

Let me try. I think you mean, we need to be quicker to grasp the fleeting peripheral thoughts, images, remembered bits of dialogue, emotional associations, etc., that go on continually at the fringes of our conscious awareness; and we need to proceed more slowly in driving that central thread of awareness, so that we will miss less.

Yes. Pretty good. Proceeding more slowly may result in an enriched experience, you see, because instead of trying to maintain a needle-sharp thread of logic or narrative or argument, you will concentrate on trying to accrete as many rich associations as you can, as you go along.

That is two alternate ways of proceeding that usually hate each other, or anyway don’t think much of each other.

See how good an association the movie was? The two men started off thinking they had little or nothing in common, and came to value each other’s deep human knowledge of the world, which of course included themselves as part of the world.

I see it in myself. Like the German, I lived in an intellectual bubble, somewhat divorced from ordinary life, and had to learn a different way of living – a different set of values –

Everyone at some point (and in many cases often, not merely once) finds that life has brought them to a point where they can only grow by absorbing what they had refused, which in practice amounts to saying, “I was wrong. I made wrong choices. I wasn’t seeing straight.”

Ah, I get it. And that can make us feel like failures.

It is exactly when you say, “I am such a fool!” that you pass out of that foolishness into a greater wisdom. And, life not being a linear process, you may expect to come to such realizations more than once in your life! Also, you may expect to be confronted occasionally, or often, or continuously, with the choice: change or maintain. Grow or stay. Feel foolish and change, or defend your position and stay.

That puts a more hopeful spin on what is often a very uncomfortable position.

You’re welcome. (Smiling.) It is a very bad habit, condemning yourselves, and a very good habit, reexamining your conduct and your intent.

Now let us circle back to our earlier point, which this has illustrated. Each of you lives in the world seeing it (and yourself) in a unique way. That way is based in pre-conscious apprehension of “how the world is.” Your layer of feelings interprets the world for you in ways you cannot learn without self-examination. But such examination will prove most enlightening and liberating. And we will tell you straight off: You will tend to say, “I have been seeing it all wrong,” or you will tend to say, “This is the only way to see it.” Neither reaction is right or wrong. Either is somewhat right, though in general we have to say it is closer to say you have been seeing things wrong (that is, incompletely or from a bias) than that the view you see is the only way to see it, except in the sense that it is right for you, at least in the moment.

So our ionizing or laminar level interprets the world for us, and it is up to us to use that view to get beyond it as best we can.

Well – to a degree. It isn’t so much that it’s up to you to get beyond it, as to live it! Life went to a certain amount of trouble to create you as a unique point of view; before you move on, don’t forget to experience that point of view.

I was thinking, a few days ago, that my early life put me in places I didn’t particularly want to be, and I would have had an easier life – and a richer one, I see now – if instead of worrying that I wouldn’t escape, I had spent more time experiencing where I was. In effect, I had a certain window on the world, and a limited time to experience it before that window closed and another opened. I might have lived with less anxiety and friction if I had trusted more.

And of course the same may be said of your experience of life as a whole: It is a window, it is of limited duration; it may be experienced as an annoyance or as an opportunity.

Label this conversation Speed and Depth, if you will, or maybe merely Texture.

Or even Speed and Texture. All right. And next time?

We will continue exploring how your particular window is created and how you maintain and change, how you experience and weigh your experiences. It is all part of the larger task of understanding your function and opportunities in the 3D life you lead at the moment.

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