I wish we could have continued yesterday. I don’t know if the connections I started to make were lost or will reappear. But – I know: Sink into it.
We did say we were at the beginning of the insight, not the end. The work of rearranging what you already know will bring each of you to overlapping but distinctive understandings, as is usual with 3D windows on the world.
One sense I got was that just as our thoughts aren’t “ours” in the way we used to assume they were, so maybe neither are “our” emotions ours.
Yes, subject to definitions. “Our” may mean “occurring to us,” or may mean “peculiar to us,” or may mean “generated by us,” or even “property of us.”
And I take it that while we commonly think of thoughts and emotions as being produced by us, certainly peculiar to us, in fact they are more something that happens to us.
Again, subject to definition. In this context, define “you.” It matters.
I get it. if I define myself as 3D-me (even if I add non-3D components of me), then yes, thoughts and emotions happen to me, float by me and are grabbed. If I define myself as all that plus the aspect of myself that I experience as “external,” or not-me, then emotions and thoughts may be seen as inside rather than outside.
It is a simpler concept than sequential language allows. Again draw a big circle, representing in two dimensions what is really a sphere. The line of the circle represents the full extent of who you are vis a vis All That Is. In essence, a bubble.
Within the circle, a smaller circle, representing a smaller sphere, representing you as you know yourself. The line defining the smaller circle represents the area in which thoughts and emotions manifest. From within the smaller sphere, they appear to be at the edge, at the interface between internal and external. From the perspective of the larger sphere, they are internal interactions.
For the moment we are discussing emotions and thoughts as if they are the produce of interaction – friction, you might say – between internal and external, between subjective and objective worlds, between “me” and “it.” There is another way to see this, and we will come to it, but for now let’s stick to this aspect.
Once see emotions and feelings as not produced by you but, more, experienced by you – and your experience tells you this is so, once you see it this way – and many things change. If emotions are a ratio of friction between internal and external, how can they be described, as so many schools of thought do describe them, as if they were, in effect, objects? It isn’t that someone is created with high or low levels of emotions; it is that they are created into situation that generate high or low levels of emotion.
Yes, I see that. And that is our starting-place in 3D life.
Exactly; your starting place. Your entire life is your working-out of the problems and possibilities created by your existence within the shared subjectivity. That is, you are the grit in the mother-of-pearl, and you may become pearls.
That analogy is a little too mechanical, though. The grain of sand has nothing to say about how it is covered by the nacre to allay irritation.
No analogy is perfect, you know that. Still, it is illustrative. You, your life, with all its difficulties, with all its challenges overcome or failed, all its joys and sorrows, is a piece of grit relative to the surrounding matrix. You are a stubborn, irreducible fact that the universe must deal with, and the friction between you as you experience yourself, and you as you are in a large sense, produces the emotions you observe, participate in, identify with.
These emotions are not you considered as the smaller sphere – call it Sphere A. They are the result of Sphere A interacting with Sphere B. If it is a relatively smooth fit, perhaps there is little in the way of fireworks. If it is a continuing but stable friction, perhaps you could think of it as an aurora borealis. If it fluctuates often between smooth and violent, it may appear as thunderstorms.
Now, we said there is another way to consider it. So far we have treated emotions as products of the friction between what you are and where you are (seen from the perspective of Sphere A). But they are influenced, inhibited, enabled, transmuted, by the intent of Sphere A and by fluctuations in Sphere B. In short, like life, it’s complicated.
This is where our decisions come in.
Yes. The first way of seeing things is the predestination end; this is the free-will end. You enter into life with your horoscope fixed in many ways. This is the platform you will build from. But then you live your life,, choosing, choosing, choosing. Who do I want to be? What do I value? What do I want to improve?
Looking back at Dirk’s latest round of questions, this answer seems to not only answer 5.1, but it sort of answers, sort of obviates, questions 5.2 and 5.3.
[5.2) What purpose do these choices serve?
[5.3) Are these selected by the person as a sort of agreement? Or is the process different?]
That is what happens when you once see something from a different starting-place: Things that seemed to flow [as logical conclusions] are seen to be illusory. Conundrums resolve themselves into misunderstandings or misstatements.