TGU – assumptions about individuality

Sunday, June 6, 2021

2:30 a.m. What I chiefly took away from yesterday’s session was that we don’t necessarily experience the afterlife as individuals (in the way 3D life would lead us to expect) but as communities of aspects of a given personality, as we really though not apparently are in 3D life. But I also get that this isn’t right either. So I’m hoping you can give us light on the subject.

Of course. That’s what we’re always trying to do.

Your friend was always asking, “But what do they do over there,” thinking of the afterlife as a continuation of 3D existence without 3D limitations. Monroe described non-3D existence as individuals operating on their own, zipping through space, or as communities function much as communities function in 3D, though with different rules and assumptions, often baffling to him. Bruce Moen described “hollow heavens” in which ex-3D souls experienced the afterlife they expected to experience, until they awoke and did other things, undescribed. Swedenborg described communities of souls devoutly worshipping divinity, associated with one another according to certain characteristics.

On and on, and if the descriptions did not exactly contradict one another, they appeared to be describing very different aspects of a reality in some way fundamentally different from 3D life as you experience it. That, or they concentrated on the weighing of the souls of the newly arrived, so that Anubis could decide whether they must return to Earth for another purifying life. Or, as discussed earlier, animists made no distinction between the nature and motivations of human and those of any other aspect of nature. Animists, and Buddhists in practice, might be said to functionally deny any future not still connected to 3D existence.

Will you understand us when we say that all these ideas are somewhat right, somewhat mistaken? Will you understand if we point out that it is mostly a matter of which factors one considers and which factors one overlooks or decides are not relevant?

In the middle of that – at about the middle of the second question – I “woke up” with a start; I changed states as if coming back from a daydream, so I don’t know if the sentence ended as it began, or if I inadvertently warped it.

Concentrate, using the ringing in your ear as a guide. When such phase changes occur, the easiest way to deal with them is to note (not necessarily in writing, just to yourself) that they happened, and proceeding as if your sequence is unbroken. Intent will carry you through, as usual.

Okay.

Now, our problem with all these descriptions , and the reason they often do not carry that final necessary drop of recognition and conviction, is that they are based in your own erroneous self-definitions. Chemistry first had to conceptualize atoms and molecules if it was to build an understanding of how things combined in 3D. (Note, we said an understanding. Someone connected with non-3D and also versed in the physical sciences could intuit alternate ways to look at chemistry that would not reduce matter to atoms and molecules, and would discover the source of fluidity in natural composition, deemphasizing stability and rigidity.)

I get that you tempted yourself into that side-trail because it is a natural offshoot of your argument. How we think things are, determines how we can think they are outside the context we constructed our understanding in.

That’s right. Any description of the rules of life is true and binding only as long as you remain within the confines of the assumptions defining the situation.

And our assumption of individuality stunts our ability to understand what happens when we drop the body that has been holding that “individual” together.

Not quite. Or, let’s say yes but no. The picture you can construct will depend upon the assumptions you can gather.

I know what you mean, but that didn’t say it. You mean, I think, reality has many contradictory features, and depending upon which ones we notice and which ones we do not notice, or perhaps actively deny, the building-blocks we have available for construction of a mental picture will be different, and limited according to which subset we decided were valid tools (probably “the only” valid tools) available.

Understand, we aren’t talking here about which set of rules will apply to you as an ex-3D individual. We are talking about which aspects of your known and unknown life you will be able to understand and concentrate on, because that is what will be the bounds to your exploration. Any starting-point that assumes that you are each a unit and not also a community will see things very differently than one that begins by thinking of you as a community that had been living together in a body and (more important) mind.

I get a vague but definite idea that we live on as an individual yet also as a community, and even perhaps as the original constituents of such community. I can’t make much sense out of that, yet I feel it is clarifying (behind my back, so to speak)  as I try to express it.

Well, sure, what would you expect? The effort of expressing involves the effort of conceptualizing, of focusing, of clarifying. Why wouldn’t it?

It seems a little “pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps.”

And here is yet one more example of how your default position so often assumes that you are alone, and that if you don’t hold the place, or help the sun rise in the morning, it won’t get done.

Huh! That is a persistent default position, isn’t it? Religious or animist mental worlds probably don’t default to the assumption, “I am alone and if I forget the place, there is no one to help me remember.”

Nothing is more easily underrated than another person’s religion, or philosophy, or even working assumptions. You see the arbitrary boundaries and the aspects of life it misses (or anyway seems to you to miss) and you shake your head in pity or condescending regret, never suspecting that your own belief-system is necessarily also somewhat arbitrary, certainly incomplete, certainly somewhat inconsistent. This is true and cannot be avoided, but it can be ameliorated by your remaining aware of the situation: “Yes, that belief-system is limited. So is your own.”

So, in this case, we’re going to have to try to insert a crack into people’s various belief systems to show that all these ways of seeing the basis of the life after 3D are somewhat true and somewhat false and always incomplete. Speaking to each of you as individuals, we say, you will not be able to absorb the benefits of the discussion if you cling to a sense that you already know that certain belief-systems have nothing to offer.

To be blunt: If you wish to make progress, you are going to have to recognize, confront, and overcome your prejudices.

I know where this is going. (At least, I think I do.) It is the intellectual fashion of the 20th and 21st centuries to assume that religion is fraud and superstition, as opposed to Science or Marxism or The Free Market or whatever materialist superstition one believes in. I have seen it for decades (having been on the inside of that attitude myself for a few years in college and beyond).

Well, if people do face their prejudices and recognize them as such, rather than thinking of them as reality, new world will open up. It probably needs saying that if someone comes to the discussion out of a religious framework, their superstitions too will be challenged. It has to be that way, for anyone to change. You don’t change by maintaining that your way of seeing things is right and any alternative is not. This doesn’t mean that anything and everything you are confronted with is right; it does mean that you can’t benefit from anything you refuse to consider.

And it ought to be obvious that if we are going to present a new view of your life beyond your 3D death, we are going to cover territory occupied (and disputed over) by various sincere inquirers over millennia. Or do you suppose that none of them knew anything, that none of them knew anything that you don’t, that your society does not? Among those things are some that your society subsequently rejected. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t true.

Shamanism, for instance.

Among many other things, yes. Along the way we may have to revisit many previously rejected beliefs, to see which appear differently as we look at them from a changed viewpoint.

And there is an hour and a little more.

Yes, well done again today. You may be getting the hang of this.

Very funny. Till next time, and of course we thank you as always.

 

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