TGU on our social transformation

Friday, April 2, 2021

2:40 a.m. Shall we continue on the subject of the virus and society, or do you wish to go on to something else?

In your conversation yesterday you said, rightly, that any social transformation, well-intended or not, well-aimed or not, is necessarily trivial compared to the transformation we are discussing.

I didn’t put it quite that way, I think, but that is true enough.

Recall your conversation with Skip Atwater.

Skip asked – this must have been 20 years ago, when I did my ten sessions in the black box – “What is the next stage in human development?” He may have used other words, but that was the gist of it. And I – you – responded that it would be all people walking around in their 3D lives while remembering that they were connected.

Recalibration, please.

All right. It would be us living our lives in active connection with the non-3D part of ourselves; in active communication all the time, as a routine part of our lives, taken for granted. “Here” and “there” both, all the time.

And the process of making that transition is what Bob Monroe said The Gathering is watching. And you will remember that he said that everyone alive was there because they wanted to be on the playing field instead of sitting in the stands.

I do remember. And that was nearly 30 years ago, because it had to have been either December, 1992, or March, 1993.

Yes, a long time in terms of human lifespan; perhaps not quite so long in terms of the age of the universe.

Very funny. It seems long enough ago, for sure.

Our point is that a little shift in historical perspective is in order. That is, things that began 100 years ago are not ancient history, of no relevance to your present day, merely because a century has passed. A major transformation takes place over time. It is the passage of time that allows for it to occur in a way other than catastrophe.

I get a picture, there, of geologic strata slipping by each other gradually rather than in a sudden earthquake.

Exactly. The amount of energy used and released is experienced quite differently if it is released over a long time or all at once or over an intermediate time. Even as it is, the shocks of the two world wars have not ceased producing aftershocks. Time, geography, culture – many variables determine how long it takes for any given band of humans to get the memo. There are tribes in the jungles of remote Pacific islands whose lives were unaffected by either world war, or by the developments that followed them – until one day they were affected, and their lives were never the same thereafter. That had nothing to do with their understanding what had happened, and had nothing to do with anyone’s intentions. It just happened as things unrolled.

I remember seeing Jack Paar’s short film showing the cargo cults in the Pacific islands. The natives had been living their lives. Suddenly they were surrounded by men and machines which, in passing, gave the natives a glimpse of a new world. Perhaps they got iron or steel tools, I don’t remember. But what I do remember is that the men left as suddenly and inexplicably as they had arrived, and some of the natives, in hope of getting them to return, constructed “airplanes” of wood – that is, they made up things that from the air are clearly meant to be taken for airplanes. The special must have aired in the early 1960s, nearly 20 years after the end of that war. One wonders how much longer the cargo cults continued, and what ultimately happened to those tribes. I suppose I could look it up on the internet. But this ought to illustrate your point.

Those natives were connected to their own non-3D components, remember. They, like you, did things for reasons they didn’t necessarily understand. And they, like you, comprised many strands putting them into resonance with many “past lives.” They weren’t as simple, as undivided, as you (and they) may have thought them.

You are implying that the non-3D isn’t racially segregated.

You smile, but we suggest that it will come as a new thought to some, that “ignorant” natives are themselves connected to sources of wisdom and experience as deep as your own. And this provides an opportunity to make a point that is equally obscure:

Just as your own “Upstairs” component is different from others, so others are different from you. Sounds like the same thing said twice, doesn’t it? But psychologically, it isn’t.

I think I get that. We expect our own mental world to be private and special, but we don’t always remember that so is everybody else’s, to them.

That could be – should be – stated more carefully.

I know, recalibrate. [Melodramatic sigh. J]

I suppose we could put it this way. We know (rightly or wrongly, but we’re pretty sure of it) that our social superiors underestimate the richness of our lives, from sheer failure of imagination. We are less likely to realize that we do the same to our social inferiors, for the same reason, because those on the underside of any social relationship see the power relationships more clearly.

And in order to forestall later misinterpretation, you may want to spell out your attitude toward social distinctions, for you have never done so.

Never is a long time, but perhaps I haven’t.

Well, it has always seemed to me that there is a

This really will take recalibration, to get myself fully in focus. It’s hard to express what you have never before put into words, especially given my awareness of how easily the words are misheard.

There is the individual and there is the individual in society. To oneself, everyone is equal, not as an easy abstraction or as a political statement, but as a simple expression of fact. Each individual is unique, not a better or worse copy of some master template. Each person is a window on the 3D world, a uniquely constructed amalgam of mostly invisible influences: strands, “past lives,” genetic inheritance, etc., etc. The nature of this window is necessarily mostly unknown to the other windows s/he lives among. We are all mysteries to one another. At best, we get glimpses, and even these glimpses may have more to do with what the other mirrors for ourself than with the other’s intrinsic nature and quality.

But as soon as you put these individuals into relationship with one another, comparison begins, a vast sorting-out process to see who has status and who doesn’t; who lives “at the center of things” and who is in the sticks; who has been given “the advantages” and who has not. Et cetera, et tiresome cetera. This aspect of our live is endless high school.

The same individual! But two very different pictures of life.

Yes, now carry that understanding to those South Pacific natives. In themselves they are unique windows, just as you said. Seen through the eyes of society (and “which society” would be an interesting question to pursue sometime), they are backwaters, or perhaps “noble savages,” or whatever the society wishes to project upon them.

When everybody lives connected, this bifurcation with transform!

Yes. I see it. The differences will remain, but not the psychological isolation.

Exactly. Your Park Avenue matron, your middle-class farm family, your slum dweller – and, rather more ambitiously, your Polynesian, your African, your Asian, your European and your North and South American avatars will come into closer connection, as has been happening for the past several hundred years, only now at a different level.

That’s very interesting. I hadn’t moved to that latest thought.

But speak of empires.

I have long thought that the meta-purpose of the European empires, unsuspected by anyone involved, was to become the glue connecting the world. The empires came, flourished, withered and died, but the interconnection of societies that they fostered remains, and continues. The West was the universal solvent, so to speak.

And, you see, the process continues at a new level or intensity, and, like what you call the meta-purpose of the empires, largely unsuspected.

And enough for one session.

Our thanks as always. Very interesting. Who else would connect Jack Paar and Bob Monroe?