Sunday, January 16, 2022
6 a.m. Shall we do a public session, or continue plotting the novel?
Either one is fine.
Then let’s talk for the record, if you can remember what we were in the middle of. Looking back, I see we were discussing broadening the channel, etc., and it led to some realizations about writing, and led to this past week’s private sessions that seem to be working pretty well. I had forgotten, already, how one thing led to another.
But you remembered your switches without having to be reminded.
Yeah, progress of a sort, I guess.
Writing another book is how you are thinking about your day to day life at the moment, and this is what people often do – define their moment to moment existence by what they are concentrating their attention on – but of course “what you concentrate on” is a form of ignoring of context that tends to distort your view, in the same way experiencing life moment by moment (as one does, necessarily, in 3D) distorts your view.
I think you are saying merely that although it is important that we eat, shop, read – do those things we do every day, usually without recording them –
Got a little tangled?
Well, you do it, then. You can paraphrase yourselves as well as I can.
It was not a particularly profound point, merely that life has an overall continuity to it that may escape your attention mostly because one tends to notice difference easier than sameness. But it is always worthwhile to be as conscious as possible.
That last sentence could use come explicating. Easily misunderstood, I’d think.
Yes. We aren’t saying, “Be as wide awake as possible, every minute of the day.” If that were desirable, it would be, at least, possible, as it is not. Relaxation of tension is at least as important as holding the tension, unless one wishes to destroy the enhanced concentration of which the tension is a manifestation. No, we mean, “In general, see things as clearly as possible.” Make a habit of seeing straight. Correct biases in perception that creep into your daily habit. To do so requires that you be as conscious as possible, but consciousness, even awareness, is not a synonym for unceasing vigilance at a high degree of tension.
Well, as you said, not a particularly profound point.
We smile. Not every insight comes accompanied by high drama – nor by low drama either. But you will find that people’s lives change as they pay closer attention to what is actually happening, as opposed to what they have been thinking was happening.
Are we about to discuss current events?
Only insofar as we may remind you that nobody came to be alive in this time except by choice. (The question of whose choice is a little bit complex, given that, strictly speaking, “you” did not exist until created, but your larger being’s existence is a form of you – it extends to you – and so for most purposes may be considered to be you.) Don’t waste your time wishing you had been born elsewhere or elsewhen; you would have had to be a different person.
Yes. I think we’ve been through that.
You’d be surprised how often it bears repeating. People forget. However, it is a useful reminder to people that each of you is integrally connected to the “external” events shaping your lives. Your personal subjectivity contributes to and draws from the collective subjectivity that we have been calling the shared subjectivity. If you can once really get that, and remember it, everything changes for you, and a great burden of anxiety drops away.
Yes, that was my experience. It is quite liberating, to know that it is not up to you to see that the sun comes up in the morning.
But of course the more naturally responsible the person, the harder it may be to drop the illusion of extended responsibility, because it will feel like being ir-responsible.
I think we see it every day now, as people pretend to themselves that there is a connection between their making judgments about current events, and affecting them.
And as you well know, there is a connection, but, as we know you also know, that connection is different from what you are decrying. Just as attention is not necessarily the same as worry, so judging is not the same as actually affecting.
Ed Carter called it voting.
Correctly defined, that’s true enough. That is, what you are is a form of voting on the non-3D level. There is a distinction to be made here, not so easily done, perhaps. Let’s see.
- You live in 3D extending into non-3D.
- Your choices are made in two ways: internally and externally.
- Even to you, the distinction is not always clear.
- What you value, what you seek to express by your life, is first of all internal. It is a matter of who you are without considering your interaction with the shared subjectivity.
- But those values, that expression, may or may not be supported by your external actions. If not, you have a problem.
- On the other hand, those values, that expression, may or may not be opposed by external forces. This is not the same as not being expressed by you, and is not a problem in the same way.
I think I get the distinction. What we want to be, and how we act, may be considered as our casting our vote for this or that. Our actions may be affected by what goes on around us – probably can’t help being affected, in fact – but an action willed is not the same as an action forced upon us.
Not quite, but in the right direction. Not “forced.”
Go ahead.
Suppose you are alive in the United States in 1850. Slavery is alive and well, and the forces supporting it are virulently active. You came into the world opposing slavery, but here you are – age 50, say – and it has coexisted with you your whole life. You have had to live with it, even if at a distance. It was no more in your power to overcome it than it was to fly on an airplane: The times had not yet come to that. You could say you were forced by your times to coexist with slavery – even, by paying your taxes, supporting it. But that is using the work “forced” in a strained sense that obscures rather than illumines. Shall you say you are “forced” to live between the orbits of Venus and Mars? Yes, you are, but the concept is thus stretched until it loses its meaning. Where you live, when you live, even to some extent how you live, is context you can’t alter. But you know full well what it is that you can alter.
Our attitude toward it.
Exactly. And your attitude toward what happens to you is your vote. It has nothing to do with abolishing slavery in 1850, but perhaps that attitude in 1850 helped abolish it when push finally came to shove.
So specifically for us today?
Do not fall into the error of thinking you know best about anything. Do not think it is up to you to keep the sun coming up in the right place at the right time. Do not fall for the line that says doom is right around the corner. And most of all, choose not to fear, for as Dune rightly said, fear is the little death, the mind killer.
Got it. Thanks as always, and maybe we can do some more plotting of the novel after a while.