Monday, July 26, 2021
2:35 a.m. Maximum focus and receptivity. Maximum comprehension, maximum fluency. All yours, guys: L:et’s talk about eternal recurrence and the reciprocal interaction that is our life, in light of the present-moment’s extra energy.
Hold in mind that all this is in service of an explanation of our lives after you leave 3D. If you lose sight of that goal, you lose sight of the reason for the explanations, hence, of the connection.
Yes, I get that. We continue to look for the meaning of life (3D and non-3D; life as we know it, life we call the afterlife), not from the point of view of any one individual or even any one individual-community, but as a system.
Well – we’d say not so much one or the other, but both. That’s why so much tedious exposition over so many years. But we’re closing in on it, now.
We are not yet ready to look at the source of specialness of the living-present moment, but we can take it for granted while we look at its effect, because everybody experiences it, even if few or none can analyze it.
Let’s talk about eternal recurrence, and Ivan Osokin, in light of that essential difference. Sketch your understanding, lightly, bearing in mind that we don’t care what Nietzsche or Ouspensky were aiming at; we care about the spark that may be conveyed by talking about their ideas as understood by you, and used by us, and picked up by others.
Yes, I get what you’re wanting us to do. As I understand it, eternal recurrence suspects that – although the moving finger writes and we can’t undo a line, as Omar Khayyam noted – this may not be the end of the story. The plot of Ivan Osokin is that Ivan as an older man is given a chance to relive his life and undo so many past mistakes, but in the end winds up doing the same thing, again and again. The point there is that even foreknowledge wasn’t enough to overcome his habits and character. (As Emerson put it, “Character is fate.”)
And our point here? Our reason for looking at the concept?
Well, it’s obvious, I think. No moment of time can be lived originally more than once. However, having been lived, that moment continues to exist as a sort of computer memory, held by an undeviating electrical charge, you could say. But the whole point of computer memory is that it can be rewritten in any specific, at any scale, by intent.
Not to call the universe, or reality, a computer, but yes, that is the analogy. Every moment exists as it did exist, unless and until it is interacted with by that extra charge of energy that allows the memory to hold a different value. To change the analogy, until outside energy allows the iron filings freedom to rearrange themselves.
These interactions are natural in themselves, of course – what can happen that is not natural? – but they can easily appear to be super-natural within their own limited context. They break the bounds of what is considered possible, so clearly they are miraculous. After all, injured soldiers do not receive healing in the middle of the night from a non-corporeal presence. So when it is experienced, it can be experienced only as a miraculous setting-aside of natural law.
But now, look downstream from such an event, and upstream. What do you see?
I see that everything changes, all the time. Invisible connections run between various lives, and you can’t change any one strand without potentially changing others it connects to. And any one change anywhere may cause other changes, shifting the balance within individuals far removed in space and time from that initial change. They don’t need to know that Joe Smallwood even existed; the change in him creates the potential for change in them, and they act on it or they don’t.
And of course, the originating change ripples on forever, because of course it was not itself an uncaused cause. Everything is cause, everything is result, everything is only an interim report. You can no more fix life in any one position than you could fix exploding fireworks. You can take photos of a moment in time’s fireworks; you can’t fix the moment itself into one frozen pattern.
You know all this. You live it, whether or not you understand it. But – as we keep saying – we are showing it to you from a different angle.
I am having a hard time keeping away memories of an episode of “Person of Interest,” and I don’t know why. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with our subject.
When such things happen – when something knocks insistently on your door – you might at least glance through the glass to see who it is. It’s hard to have irrelevant elements in a dream.
Very funny. It’s about this guy who finds out that he has been a father for several years – having been lied to about his girlfriend having had an abortion. He’s Irish-American, very likeable, and of course Finch and Reese and company assure that he gets –
Oh, I get it. His life never was what he thought it was, because there was vital information withheld from him. His future life will be different because he discovered the truth and acted upon it, and both discovery and action were possible only through the assistance of previously unsuspected friends who were, in effect, deus ex machina.
Yep, pretty irrelevant.
Always glad to keep you amused.
But you see, Finch and Reese operate from intelligence provided by the all-seeing machine. They act altruistically and with effectiveness. They don’t usually know what they are getting into, but their basic orientation – to do good, to help, to right wrongs – is their strongest card.
Even though it always requires fist fights and wrecked cars and lavish expenditures of ordnance.
Still, the analogy is clear, or at least we hope it is clear. Life is continually rebalancing, and it does so by continuous interconnected intervention into what might seem like fixed situations.
And that’s our afterlife? Being the machine feeding Finch numbers?
No, your afterlife – ours, everyone’s – is continuing to act as we have always acted, relating, being changed and changing, in all these moments, along all these extensions. You – we – are woven into the fabric of all these moments: Do you think you can be pulled out? But this is not the whole story. We would be very surprised if any of you could believe that it was, for you know better. In your bones, you know better.
It’s true. What you sketched feels true, as usual, but, just as you say, it isn’t enough.
No. But to go beyond this level is to switch gears yet again. Everything we said is true at one level, and nearly irrelevant at another, just as your knowledge of how to digest starch and produce body sugars doesn’t help you to pick stocks or envision quilts, let alone plot novels or lose yourself in science-fiction movies. In short, there’s a lot more to life than your philosophy dreams of, Horatio.
Thank you, lord Hamlet. So next time, we begin where?
Let’s say what we have been describing is the reality of the soul. There is the more ethereal world of spirit yet to look at, and then the question of how to remember the one while examining the other.
Looking forward to it. Till then, thanks as always.
If I am understanding correctly, it seems to me that the “impersonal forces” mentioned before that flows through our shared and personal subjective lives are the connections to all times and places. It doesn’t seem as much to be impersonal in this context, since we are affected and affect every other aspect of existence (i.e. we are affected by the impersonal forces, and we are the impersonal forces). This appears obvious when said, given that there is no “external”, but perhaps there is more to the impersonal forces.