Translation difficulties

Tuesday, January 18, 2022

5:55 a.m. Switches set. Perhaps we can talk more of first life and eternal life? Or, whatever is appropriate for the morning.

We were setting out the conditions behind the Egyptian understanding of the situation in the session yesterday, which you did not send out.

I’m reconsidering. Maybe I’ll send out the afternoon session, beginning at 1:55. The morning session is personal and also is concerned with plotting the novel.

Insert the later session.

[Monday:] 1:55 p.m. So let’s go again. I’m feeling the cold breath on my neck again. Time is on the wing, as ever. Setting switches. Tell me about first life and eternal life. How can I use it, how can I point to it, and by implication how can I live it, as well as write about it?

Tell your idea of what the Egyptians believed, and how it manifested. It doesn’t have to be historically accurate to inform your judgment: Wrong ideas can be as creative and as useful as right ideas, depending upon the person’s openness to gentle inspiration as he goes along.

Hmm, interesting thought, that. Hopeful, too. And here I am with books and pictures of Egypt, waiting to be mined for inspiration.

All right. Watching that documentary about the Saqqara tomb, I heard one of the authorities use the term “first life” and it seems to have burrowed deep within me. Here’s what I think. The Egyptians felt that a birth into the 3D was in some way a fresh start, every time. We know that they believed in reincarnation of a sort, because if Anubis weighted their heart and it was heavier than a feather, or if the soul was unable to answer that it had never committed any of a long list of sins – 38, I think, but the exact number doesn’t much matter – the soul had to return to earth, to try again.

Looked at in that light, each life could be seen as a trial process, a refining process. Only those who could pass through the sieve at the end of their lives could graduate to the next step.

But that means they did not regard life as “one and done.” They saw us coming back repeatedly.

However, it may not be that simple. Is it ever? You still can’t get around their talking about this “first life.” Now, I suppose this could mean “first” in the sense of “this before something that follows,” rather than “this as an initial effort.”

Good distinction. You may want to expand it for your own sake later, when the idea may have become hazy.

First as in “previous,” not first as in “absolutely not preceded by anything.”

All right, keep thinking.

Well, we have been thinking in a similar way. We as communities have one life in  the driver’s seat, as far as I can tell, and many lives as back-seat drivers. So in that sense, it is “one and done,” but it is also, repeated trial of our mettle.

Only – is it? It seemed so as I began that paragraph, but not as I ended it. There’s something wrong. Help me out.

It is a distortion caused by 3D thinking, 3D analogies. In reality everything lives forever, once it comes into being. Even if it dies –

Well, let’s try that again. In 3D, a person is born, lives, dies. But from non-3D, it is clear that there is more to the picture than appears in 3D. All the non-physical connections are invisible. Take them into account, and you see something different. You see a vast all-that-is with some physically apparent connections (called organisms and experienced as separate individuals) and many connections that are not physically apparent: the threads connecting the knots, or rings, as we said long ago. This being so, what comes into existence or dies? Instead, what happens is that certain things become apparent – that is, appear – in 3D for a certain time, and then cease to be apparent – disappear. They didn’t begin to be, then cease to be. They weren’t born and then died. They appeared and after a time disappeared.

That seems wildly improbable. Are you sure you aren’t making up an analogy?

This is why we didn’t begin this way, back when we first suggested rings and threads: That was far enough for the moment. You couldn’t have followed us that far.

Not sure I can now. But I’m beginning to get the feeling that a slow dawning is taking place at the back of my mind.

Yes, and let’s pause here while it matures. To leave you a dangling link for next time, we’ll just say that nothing is ever created or destroyed, only transformed. A toy truck made of metal and plastic may be regarded as a rearrangement of the minerals it is made of, which are themselves atoms and molecules, but what are they but bound energy, energy bound in patterns? The same goes for the non-3D, and there’s your hint.

I look forward to more later, and you’re right, that’s about it for now.

[Tuesday again:] And you see, this morning, the readjustment in thinking we are awaiting?

I think I do. It’s still very elusive.

Try.

We tend to think, “This, then that, then the next thing,” because that is how life in 3D comes at us, or comes to us, whichever way you want to think of it. That way of thinking is so natural, but it assumes that something goes from “was” to “will be” by way of “is”: The present moment is the successor to the no-longer-existent past moment, and will be succeeded by a not-yet-existing next moment. Even 20 years and more after you corrected that view, it still creeps in unobserved, I see.

Describe the relevance to the conversation of the other way of seeing things.

Well, if every moment of time exists forever, and every moment is living rather than frozen, here is the only place we are or can be. Now is the only time we are in, or can be in. But even having put it that way, I can see that the sense of it probably doesn’t come through. I’m hoping you can do better.

This is why “Be here, now” is a shorthand toward understanding how to get the idea. Here, now, is the only condition there is. Nothing is “there, then” except from the point of view of every other “here, now.”

It’s what I somehow knew, reding history and trying to somehow make it come out differently. I didn’t have any concepts telling me it would be possible, or even how it ever could be possible; but the boy that I was just knew it in his bones, and fortunately had enough sense not to talk about it. And later I “realized” that of course that wouldn’t have been possible. I was right about that and, I gather, also wrong.

You are right in one context (3D living), wrong in another (the larger picture).

I can see that you have had to create or silently not object to a whole lot of epicycles along the way, as I have tried to make sense of the situation, with inadequate data and inadequate concepts.

We have indeed, but you might say everyone is always having to do that – and you know we don’t throw around words like “everyone” and “always” indiscriminately. Given that ultimate reality is beyond description, given that neither you nor we will ever have more than a sliver of ultimate truth, the net effect is that we are always playing with abstractions that are somewhat true. “You do the best you can” is always worth remembering.

So, in this case?

The translation difficulty is between a 3D-bounded and a not-3D-bounded way of seeing. From our point of view, the situation is this: There is only one “here,” only one “now.” The sense that you move from one moment to the next is an illusion. Your consciousness moves. It is so hard to explain. It is the difference between thinking the geography of your country is created beneath your feet as you move and disappears from existence as you leave it, and thinking that the geography always exists regardless of where you walk or in what direction or timing. But this is nearly impossible for you to imagine as the real (or, let’s say, the real-er) explanation; it requires overruling your sensory evidence, including the sense of time passing.

I can get it, just barely, and it involves an internal contradiction. On the one hand, everything springs up at the moment of the world’s creation – all the possibilities, all of us in all scenarios. It all exists, and we move along it like a specific iteration of a video game among the predetermined set of possibilities. We’ve looked at that analogy many times, but it isn’t the whole story, because how can it be? Our experience contradicts the idea, just as you say. We can host the idea, can accept it abstractly, but it’s nearly impossible to make it as real as what we experience every moment. Because on the other hand, the mind rebels: What sense would it make for us to be going through the motions (if the play is predetermined) or to be inventing our lines as we go along, still within preexisting limits (if the play if free-willed)? How can a future, or even all futures, spring into existence simultaneously with the past, or all pasts? What does that make the present moment?

We could almost guarantee you that many people will have been lost by your paragraph. It will seem too abstract and theoretical, too unconnected with “real life.”

You don’t need to tell me! But it is my best attempt to explain the problem.

And not a bad attempt, we aren’t saying that. But you see, the problem is precisely that when you see the contradiction clearly, where do you go? How do you make sense of the whole thing?

I get – and got long ago – that the apparent contradiction is corrected when we remember that reality is not solid but is mental; that all of 3D is a dream, not a building.

That is true but not quite adequate now. Now you need to consider what the Buddhists and Hindus know: The world is continually being created and re-created, many times faster than your 3D senses could ever hope to record, they of course being creatures of that creation. You may come to understand it, or believe it; you cannot come to experience it by your senses, any more than you could see light as vibration rather than as light. You can’t see behind appearances. You can, at best, know.

And I guess our sense of free will among apparent predetermination is rooted in the perpetual re-creation of the world.

Of reality. Yes, in a way. You might look at each re-creation of the world as an update on the state of the shared subjectivity.

The world changes according to how we all change it.

Yes, to that degree, your “common sense” view of the world is congruent with the underlying reality. However, this leads us to what we’re trying to convey at the moment: You are only where and when you are. You don’t “move” or “progress” or “evolve” in the way you may have been thinking, because that isn’t the way reality works; it is the result of mistaken contexts, uncomplete perceptions, and (therefore) flawed logical deductions.

I’m getting glimpses. “I” don’t move on to other lives in 3D. I am not a back-seat driver in the sense that I am driving this one. “I” exist only here, now.

Yes, but that’s going to take some explaining. As we said at the outset, reincarnation is true in a sense, and one-life is true in a sense, and the reason each view is somewhat true and not absolutely true is that reality is not what it appears to be. We have spent 20 years of your life, and more, trying to make that statement real to you, and it seems we have succeeded. But there’s so much more to say!

Well, the stores are full of pens and spiral notebooks; computers have lots of electrons just aching to hold data, so no reasons to give up on this end.

We smile. Call this, perhaps, “Translation difficulties.”

Or maybe, “First life concepts”?

As you decide.

In any case, our thanks as usual, and see you next time.