Let’s proceed to Dirk’s question 3-3, and the clarification he provided, at my request.
[3.3 Often it seems that moods and feelings get set into places. How does that work? What is happening there?
[I have encountered many places where a particular mood in people who go there seems to be associated with the place. I am not talking about graveyards or places with great vistas, or other similar obvious places.
[I am talking about places with no obvious or apparent attributes. In these places people somehow sense some aspect of the place and it shows up as a mood – whether that is somber, joyous, sad, frustrating, anxious, calm, happy, silly, carefree, ….
[It is a bit like when people arrive at a place where people died, and those who later visit that place entirely unaware of that history in some way sense that.
[The reactions I have seen tend to be like those when people enter a church, or great hall, or a library. The place changes them. However, again, the ones I am interested in are ones where there is no obvious or apparent sign that anything is different, yet none the less, people’s mood, attitudes and behaviors change when they arrive there.
[I include sacred sites in that list, though they are not the ones I find most striking. I have been especially struck by the ones where people quite suddenly become joyous or silly for no obvious reason. Sacred sites tend to be on ley lines and such. At the sites that most interest me, I sense no such energetic reason either.]
I have had ideas about Dirk’s question. Let’s see how they square with yours. When I did Bruce Moen’s Afterlife Knowledge workshop some years ago, I experienced something very different from anything I had been expecting. I experienced an energy-being at a sacred site that was the “sacredness” of the sacred site. I can’t remember any more than that. Can’t remember if the being was somehow “stuck” or belonged there. That was enough years ago, I’d have a hard time finding my notes on it. I guess my question would be, Does that experience bear on Dirk’s question?
Your example and those Dirk cited are examples of a characteristic of the world that is often overlooked or misunderstood because it does not fit very well into categories commonly accepted. This is an example of how ideas distort direct perceptions, so that you don’t experience what you really experience; you experience your idea of what you experience.
A simple concept, but it gets murky as we try to express it. You mean, I know, that our ideas act as filters, preventing us from seeing things as they are, if what they are doesn’t fit with what we expect.
When you look at these examples conventionally, they seem to be either inexplicable or they divide space into different kinds. Thus, sacred space, ordinary space. Or – as you have often noted – wooded spaces as opposed to spaces without trees. Inspirational landscapes, depressing landscapes, etc. But this looks different when you remember to apply our understanding of the “external” world as a shared subjectivity, rather than as the “objectively there” thing it appears to be.
Once remember that the entire world is a living conscious field created and maintained in the same way that your personal consciousness was created and is maintained, and you see that there is no division between space and characteristic, between rock and “energy being,” between a passive place and people’s emotions, feelings, experiences that may attach to it. It is experienced that way, but in essence, it is all mind. Group-mind, but mind. There is nothing dead in the universe, nothing separate.
The “eternal” world is mind, just as is our internal world that we never cease to experience as consciousness. (As if personal consciousness only, usually.) Because the “external” mind is communally maintained, it is relatively inflexible when seen from any of our personal minds, and is usually perceived as if external because sensory data is attributed to it, and intuitive data is considered something separate. That is, what you know intuitively about the “external” world, we are taught to think of as “merely” our ideas about it, not it in and of itself.
Precisely. When you learn to regard and to experience the world as mind-stuff, as shared subjectivity, you no longer need to sort out your perceptions into “fact” and “feelings.” Then the magic opens up.
Now, Dirk’s question asks how.
Well, the “how” of it isn’t very important, next to the fact of it.
This is an absurd analogy I am feeling.
Pursue it.
I get a sense of a non-stick frying pan. As opposed to an uncoated frying pan, I suppose, or perhaps as opposed to the stickiness of whatever would be cooked on it.
The example appears absurd because out of context, and because the analogy is to function rather than to objects. And perhaps it is not the best analogy, but it is what we have available to work with.
Our point is that landscape is relatively solid, like geology itself. Relative to an individual life, or even generations of individual lives, it changes not. Like the mountains or the oceans, it persists, seemingly unchanged and unchangeable.
Human experience, by contrast, seems incidental, transient, momentary, specific.
Se we are the organic material and the external world is the frying-pan, either coated or not-coated with a non-stick surface?
We smile. Not exactly. You aren’t a scorched spot.
Then –?
Strongly experienced emotion may easily imprint upon surroundings, and if the surroundings are not altered physically, or cleared psychically, the imprint will remain, to be sensed by anyone sensitive enough to do so, willingly or otherwise.
But it isn’t only trauma or ecstasy that imprints; those are imprints from the human side. Imprints from the nature of the site itself is a different kind of imprint, not specific but perhaps all the stronger and more pervasive for that. The “feel” of virgin forest, say, or of high mountainous land, or limitless sea. What people experiences there is not “merely” personal; it is not something to be pigeonholed or disregarded as “sentimental” or conceptual, any more than is a haunted house or a sacred site.
As to the “how” of it, ask yourself how emotion or feeling or mood (which sometimes may be seen as habitual feeling) attaches itself to anything. How does it attach to a memory, for instance? How does an emotion attach itself to an idea? To a concept about some experience?
The answer, I take it, is that things that share a moment of time remain automatically linked.
That isn’t wrong, but because it is in an awkward conceptual framework, it will seem contrived. So, say the same thing in the terms we have been encouraging you to see in.
Any idea or deduction or generalization we may experience shares the moment of shared subjectivity it appeared in, no less than any more material manifestation.
It must, because internal and external are part of the same overall living moment.
Yes, I see that. So even though we may categorize things into two different schemes – sensory or intuitive, “objective” or “subjective” – they are always going to be joined at the hip because they are in fact two aspects of one thing.
So there is the “how” of it, you see. No special mechanism is necessary or even possible; it is automatic in the nature of things. However, to become sensitive to the existence of a feeling link with a site may require (or repay) special training, or may depend upon special abilities (which amounts to saying, may depend upon one’s sensory/intuitive mix being within a particular range). But unconscious reactions do not depend upon one’s awareness, obviously.
A very good question, which does what good questions do: It acted as guide to bring us to new territory.