The Interface: Living ideals

The floor is yours. I don’t know how to pursue this.

Well, think where we are: We reminded you, As Above, So Below. You are not only 3D-human, you are part of something vastly larger. Your ideas of the afterlife always tend to be warped by unconscious assumptions based in your sensory experience during 3D life. And, not least, it isn’t so much a question of you as window on the 3D world as it is of you (from your point of view) experiencing the 3D world as it reflects the light behind it.

We will take the question to be the larger question motivating your whole career: What is real, what is it all about, why do I or anybody matter. That question has already taken us far.

The first thing is to hold as large and nuanced a picture of the 3D and non-3D world as you can. To the degree that you can hold this, you magnetize greater understandings to you. Every scheme of things is based on one’s conscious and unconscious assumptions.

In a way, all our explanations are fairy-tales we tell ourselves?

Let’s say, they always are at the level of your understanding. How else could it be? Even the things you believe or half-believe (knowing that you don’t understand them) are keyed to your level of understanding. If you wish to understand more, to become wiser, to open up to your greater potential, you must identify with your next larger level of being, and the world will change around you.

Could a fox, say, imagine the nature and purpose of reality in the same way you could? Could it see even its own fox-hood in a way that would transcend its normal mental world? We do not mean to turn to an argument about the inner world of animals; this is an illustration of the strength of 3D circumstances in persuading you of what you are. And, it isn’t wrong to see yourselves as the 3D beings you experience yourselves to be, but it is wrong to think you are not also more than that. And it is in how (whether) you are able to expand your self-definition that all else depends.

I think again of Thoreau’s saying that he learned at least this by his Walden experiment, that if one takes a step toward living the life one imagines in finer moments –.

Exactly. It was the taking the step, the moving in his life, that brought him to higher ground. After all, he lived in the woods only a little more than two years, but not only is that what he is remembered for, it is what shaped him. He thought he was going there so that he would have leisure to write, rather than having to spend most of his days earning an ability to pay rent. But what he was doing, unbeknown to his 3D self, was living as example to others, just as his friends Emerson and Alcott were doing. So with each of you: You think you are doing one thing, but your lives while you are doing that one thing are themselves doing something else. Your ideals and your lives may to some extend contradict each other; or they may reinforce or transform each other. Or – less satisfactorily but still part of life’s potential – they may have nothing much to do with each other.

Walter Mitty?

Interesting example. His external life shows no traces of his inner; his inner does not affect his outer. Yet, looked at more closely, perhaps one could say that his real life was his inner fantasy and his merely external 3D life was only the support that allowed the inner life scope. Of course he is only an invented character, but that he resonates with so many people ought to show that he is more representative than one might think.

I’m feeling that this entry isn’t very valuable so far.

We love you too.

Walter Neff’s line from “Double Indemnity.”

Well, look at that Walter. Another invented character who resonates with people. And what is his story? He is an ordinary man whose internal fantasy takes over one day when a femme fatale unexpectedly provides the opportunity. In living that fantasy as best he can, he finds that reality contradicts it; that his own character contradicts it. Therefore the external world assures that his fantasy fails.

I don’t think most people would describe “Double Indemnity” that way.

Perhaps not, but perhaps they wouldn’t be looking at it from our point of view.

So let us add a third Walter – Walt Disney. Here is a man rather than an invented character. His inner life is vivid enough to lead him from thing to thing – from Steamboat Willie to Fantasia to the Mickey Mouse Club to Disneyland. His orientation with the 3D world is efficient enough to allow him to bring his internal fantasies into realization. But without that internal world, what would he have had to work with?

It isn’t like this is a new theme for us: We have been playing this tune right along. But as always, new places to stand open up new perspectives. Looking at it from a point of view that remembers how much larger you are inside than outside; remembering that what seems so objective and real is also only shared subjectivity; remembering that your lives are necessarily animated by vast impersonal forces blowing through the structures you create and experience, looking at your lives from your widest comprehension, you see that you are more than you usually experience yourselves to be, therefore your potential is greater (and more shrouded in mystery) than you usually conceive it to be, and therefore your potential freedom to become is greater than you usually realize.

Taking the three Walters as examples, you may remind yourselves, you either may make no attempt to turn your inner visions into external reality; or you may do so with disastrous results; or you may create wondrous things. To some degree it is your fate; to some degree it is your choice, or let’s say choices.

Well, I think we exercised a little bit of ingenuity, bringing in Walter Mitty and Walter Neff and Walter Disney. Take that, Jane Roberts.

We smile. Till next time.

Leave a Reply