Thursday, June 10, 2021
4:30 a.m. Good morning, gentlemen. To continue – Since we don’t produce ourselves, and we are not produced by an accident, what does produce us?
Bearing in mind the essentials – ingredients, rules of procedure, and an envisioned result. This will take us beyond the futile and ungrounded arguments about theism, deism, or atheism. Not that such arguments may not have value in and of themselves, but they lead you into contention and division rather than raising sparks and offering ways leading toward greater comprehension.
Much as your using 3D and non-3D did, avoiding the snarls words like “spiritual” and “physical” can put us into.
We see value in a dispassionate view of things, in the interest of careful examination and productive thought. Passion of course has its place in other contexts.
Now, in analysis, remembering the key rule of “As above, so below” is a pearl beyond price. This implies, however, that certain questions, to which this rule cannot be easily applied, are less valuable in analysis. They may have value in other contexts but not in analysis. And one such question is, “How did the system originate?” It can be reasoned through, to some extent, but mostly it must remain unanswerable. Thus we have said that the goldfish is unlikely to have created the goldfish bowl in which it finds itself, or the water in which it lives. But beyond this, how far could the goldfish reason? Could it even get that far, to a realization of the limits of its understanding? You see?
I get that you’re saying, “Let’s not waste time on abstract unanswerable questions like “Did the universe always exist or was it created, and, if so, how and by whom?”
We don’t say there is no room for such questions. We do say there is little point in centering on them when instead we can be profitably exploring much more practical questions that can be answered, or can at least be better bounded. And the question of how the system functions – as opposed to how the system came into existence – is one such practical question. And within that is the question of how 3D individuals are created, and by whom, and by what rules. In these questions, analogy and reasoning and direct experience and periodical reference to “As above, so below” should result in much greater clarity, in the way that “3D and non-3D” provided a way to look at a system in its unity and its diversity with minimal distraction by peripheral mental associations.
I see that. Can’t imagine what you are going to come up with, though. The ringing in my ear is strong, so I live in hope that you have something.
We smile. You spend a certain amount of time and energy living in expectation. Perhaps you should consider it the price of the ticket.
To give you a sense of the ground rules within which you operate, we will need to proceed from an unfamiliar point of view. If this were a novel, you would say the narrator is no longer first person but third person. Carefully, now, and slowly, with your truth-recognition senses functioning acutely:
- Consider “the times” as if a person. The year 1953, say, and a given month and day. Take this (for the moment) to be a player, an active participant rather than merely an abstraction.
- Consider (again, for the moment) the entirety of 3D as the one playing field. Consider the non-3D as if it were an adjunct to 3D. That is, consider the 3D as primary in importance and as the motivating factor.
- Remember that the 3D is not a collection of rocks in space, but is a mental construct of something that is at a different plane of existence. We will have to explain that, we see. Let’s continue, though.
- Consider the 3D “external” world to be the shared subjectivity of the entire human race, which it is, but, you can see, it has to be more than that. We’ll have to explain that too – or rather, you will.
- You could say that the situation constellates new individuals. “The times” demand new combinations of characteristics, and draw them forth. Each new age has new types of individuals. That’s one reason why it is a new age. In other words, the sentence could be said backwards as well, and be as true: New individual types produce new ages.
- Within this system, different viewpoints appear to support different views of life’s rules. Deists, theists and atheists each find support for their views by the range of aspects they are able to consider. In fact, you could say that the range of facts you can see determines your view of what is real. However, to choose only one or the other of these ways of seeing things is to unnecessarily truncate your understanding.
Now, that was a lot of information in a few words. Restate your understanding of it, and we’ll see how clear it is to you.
I think I’ll work backwards from the last point you made. I’d say:
- Interpretation of the rules of life is largely a matter of individual limitation.
- The kind of person who appears at a given time is determined by what is needed by the shared subjectivity, and, at the same time, in the usual reciprocating-process way, the kinds of people who appear help determine the characteristics of the age they appear in.
- An important new concept you snuck in here is that the shared subjectivity consists of the entire human experience, yes, but also everything else. This I take to be an indicator that we as humans are not separate from the rest of creation, not that I thought we were.
- Another concept to be explored is that the shared subjectivity has to be projected from a higher plane of existence, that “more real” reality that I sensed once, that others have also reported.
- Your first two points as I understand them were merely saying, consider a given 3D moment as if it were a sentient being, and as if it were the important thing to consider, rather than its origin or its non-3D component.
Accurate? Close? Way off?
Some may find it cryptic, or even meaningless. This will be if they don’t grasp the underlying idea. But those who have felt for our meaning should find it an acceptable paraphrase, yes.
But can we accept the idea of “the times” as a sentient being?
Expressed in that way, probably not. But here you are facing a problem of language. As so often, language that was (is) developed to express existing understandings is less able to express new understandings. So as it is used to do so, it will seem to be twisted into nonsense, perhaps, or poetry.
Let us try to rephrase the concept so that language does not render it incomprehensible or unbelievable. What you call “the times” is a snapshot of the shared subjectivity in tis 3D aspect. The shared subjectivity, remember, is alive, it is mentally active, it is the boiling-up of relationships as they exist. So is it such a metaphor to talk of “the times” as if they were a personality?
It is a way of saying that our 3D reality is sort of a shadow of what is really going on.
You could put it that way, but then you’d find yourself in need of more explaining. Better to say the 3D moment is part of the All-D moment; that all of reality – physical, mental, imagined, experienced, “alive,” “inert,” etc. – is an expression of one underlying unity that is (as Paul Brunton ably demonstrated by logic) one mental construct. It must be obvious that reality cannot be the mental construct of any one – or any subset – of its members. A whole is produced out of a greater whole, not out of a lesser.
Now we have done pretty well this morning, and there is your hour.
I think so too. And where do we start next time?
We have sketched the mechanism. Let’s see how well we do in sketching a specific time – the one you are living right now – both as example and for its own sake.
Okay, I look forward to it. Our thanks for all this, as always.