Monday, May 31, 2021
3 a.m. One thing keeping a journal does, it keeps you aware of the remorseless passage of time. periodically you find yourself writing the date and thinking, “Good God, we’ve already burned through [however many months it is, in whatever year it is].” And the clock never stops ticking.
So, gentlemen, shall we continue?
You are only marginally awake enough to do this.
Let’s try, anyway. The process usually focuses me, even if it also tires me.
True enough. Very well, we’ll try.
It would be easier if you, and your readers, were reliably aware of the material we provided a while ago in your time, because we could use the model we developed, and we cannot afford to retrace all that careful laying down of “this, therefore that”; your patience would be exhausted and at the end of so much recap we would be little farther ahead; we’d face the same problem of time-delay between the beginning of the explanation and the beginning of what we wished to use it to build upon. However, let’s make the attempt, beginning with the model of your self in its largest extent, of which your conscious self is only a small part.
Now that you mention it, I see that all that model, that was so clear at the time, has become vague and hazy. It’s amazing we can make any progress at all, given how the passage of time separates out our knowledge.
This is why true progress requires that you interact with the information and make it yours; that you let it change you; that you not merely judge it as you go along, retaining your sense of your present position being the touchstone. If you wish to grow, you must be willing to change. To change is to give up previous positions, not merely add detail to them. If you do change, you automatically provide yourself with whatever comes next. If you do not change, you have all the work to do over again, or else you continue in place, treading water.
So take the model of what it is to be a 3D human being. Envision a bubble, and a smaller bubble within it. The smaller bubble is your 3D awareness, remember, and the larger one, that contains it but is far greater than it, is your non-3D awareness. Beyond the bubble is the world we will try to describe.
The smaller bubble consists of consciousness and its surrounding material of which you are sometimes conscious and other material of which you are not conscious. This all shades into the non-3D being of which you are a part, and it too may be said to have points of intensity (consciousness focus points) and areas of less intensity (the unconscious, in a way). However, the analogy is not complete.
I’m getting a sense of the overall being as shot in a bag, each of which is like our 3D life.
Your perception is clearer than your expression of it so far. Proceed.
I’ll try again. If the model of the total of our 3D-plus-non-3D life is one shot, one marble, the larger being is a bagful of such marbles, each of them perhaps being another of our “past lives” or “future lives.” And the bag itself, and all its contents, is one being among many.
That’s better. Yes, and each of you as individuals may share a larger being with others (for it is not merely a matter of other “past” or “future” lives, but also “present” ones) or may be part of other larger beings. In no case is an individual 3D life the isolated, unrelated, unit it may sometimes appear to be.
And in any case, if we are communities made of many strands, each of which may be a “past life,” how can we be as isolated as we sometimes feel ourselves to be? How does this model accommodate them?
You are asking, implicitly, whether all one’s “past life” connections are of the same larger being. And yes, the answer is that no, they are not. The various larger beings are interconnected in the same way your 3D individuals are. That is one function of sexual reproduction: It continuously ties the world together.
Given how much trouble sex brings to the world, it’s good to hear that it amounts to more than a pleasant diversion.
We’re smiling too, but you see, just as sexual reproduction as a process has a unitive effect, so sexual reproduction as a system has a unitive effect in a different sense of the word. If your ancestry consists of a double amount of input, generation by generation, where is the room for isolation? You are all the product of the same ancestral pool. And if you are, we are. Nor is this true only in terms of DNA. You may regard DNA as the visible 3D markers of the presence of your ancestry. As your physical ancestry is complex, so is your All-D ancestry, only more so.
To be clear, you are saying that the larger beings are as much the product of many common ancestors as 3D beings are. Yes? But how can on-3D beings even have a past from which to have ancestors?
Well now, this carries us back to the subject of one of your very earliest perplexities, the idea that “on the other side, there is no time,” as opposed to our insistence that outside of 3D there is an equivalent of time, though the manifestation is different.
You send me back. That was 20 years ago and more, and I felt very vulnerable, saying such things even as your mouthpiece. I could feel that what you were saying was true, or at least truer than the sound-bites New Agers were reciting, but I didn’t know if for sure, and it certainly felt like an exposed position to maintain. Who was I to be contradicting so much accepted wisdom?
And so you learned the practical truth that Emerson asserted.
I did. If you firmly plant yourself upon your instincts, the whole world will come around to seeing things that way. Or, to state it less flatly, the fact that you are the only one thinking something doesn’t mean you are wrong.
If there were no process of duration in non-3D, could anything change? Could a 3D world with its ever-ticking universal clock even exist? Where would there be the space (so to speak) for a world of change to exist? Can a subset embody properties greater than, different than, the properties of the larger unit of which it is a subset?
For some reason, the ancients latched on to the idea of the skies being unchanging, as opposed to terrestrial life, and somehow that model extended to the eternal v. the time-driven. But the idea of the heavens never changing exploded in the 1600s (I think it was) when a supernova kind of put paid to the whole “unchanging” thing. Somehow an equivalent in 3D/non-3D terms didn’t happen. But it needs to.
The facts are there; it is merely a matter of people drawing out the implications. They sense that time is not the same thing in 3D and non-3D; they need to realize that “different” is not the same as “nonexistent.” But perhaps it is not particularly your job to so educate them. Their own inner promptings will lead them there when it is appropriate. That’s what the shared subjectivity is for.
Oh! Oh!
Yes, express it if you can; it will help you hold it.
I just got that the existence of the external world – the shared subjectivity – is a visible sign of our interconnection. And that the reason psychology gets caught in loops is because it tries to understand us as if we were individual, and social sciences try to understand us as if we were units in a system, and physical sciences try to understand us as if we were physical molecules interacting (so to speak).
Yes, and they are all correct, and all misleading and incorrect in that each approach has only one part of an undissevered whole. You can’t understand the physical world unless you understand that what looks like matter is actually a shared subjectivity. You can’t understand an individual psyche unless you know that it is not a unit at all, but a community of many units (none of which is itself a unit in the sense that each of them appears to be).
And you can’t understand 3D without non-3D. Does that mean we can’t understand non-3D without 3D?
That will be a good place to begin, next time.
I was awake enough, you see.
Indeed you were. Good work today.
I was thinking the same thing. Till next time, then, and thanks as always.