Sunday, February 6, 2022
7:30 a.m. Yesterday’s sessions led me to re-read A Place to Stand, and I found it very convenient to have the ten sessions in printed form. If the ten sessions in 2004 were printed up in the same way, I might re-read them. As it is, I don’t have much idea of what is in them. Nor do I suppose it is important. If anything in particular flowed from those sessions, I don’t recall it – whereas more or less everything followed from the sessions four years earlier.
So, guys, I see we’re talking about how people can do this themselves, and not very far between the lines is “And start doing it in public, and soon!”
Not quite so directive, though we are smiling with you. Still, it would be a good thing, and it is always a loss when someone does not extend into what would be productive and satisfying ground, merely because of stage-fright or excessive humility. So, to the extent that these factors are involved, then yes, we would nudge people to overcome them. But in terms of their careers for the sake of others, there are no “shoulds.” How can a person’s inner and outer career not cohere, in that they are the same thing? They may conflict; they often do, but conflict is not the same as
Can’t think of the word, eh? I know how you feel!
In any case, conflict is often productive, in the way that rubbing two sticks together is supposed to be a way to produce friction, then heat, then flame. So, the fact that one may have internal resistances – even major resistances – is not a sign that one should not follow a given impulse. It may be, it may not be. But if something within is inclined to try something, there’s a reason for that, and it ought to be honored at least by granting it a fair consideration.
So is this what we’re going to talk about today?
Not necessarily. In fact, no. It is not our place to persuade anyone to do anything. We settle for opening doors and saying, “Take a look out there. Any place you’d like to go?”
Sparks, not attempts to persuade.
Why waste our time, and yours, and theirs? Decisions come from within, and a decision made because of strong external prompting may still be wrong. People know what’s right for them.
Sometimes it takes a while to overcome programming. “It would be too good to be true, that I could do that.” That’s one.
You should know.
That’s why I mention it. So what do we talk about today?
Set your switches?
Ah. Proceed. [Pause.] You want to talk about the cat?
We want to say a word about responsibility, and your looking forward with mixed feelings to providing a home for your neighbors’ cat is a case in point.
An excuse.
A case study, let’s say. You may compare it to your becoming a father.
Yes, the comparison came to me as I was walking down the hall with my coffee in hand. People who have never had a baby, and then for the first time do have a baby to care for, find that their lives have changed in ways they may not really recognize for years and years.. I’m only going to have the cat for a few months, while they are away, and the responsibility does weight on me, a little, because it is not only a sentient being in my care, but is someone else’s sentient being. Granted, comparing taking care of a cat is not exactly in the same league as taking a sentient being from baby to adult, but there is an analogy there, however loose.
The analogy we wish you consider isn’t actually about responsibility. It is about split focus. It is about living alone and living with another, whether that other be a partner, a child or parent, a pet or – anything, really, that requires part of your attention.
Are you saying anything more than that living alone is easier, in that we don’t have to consider another?
We are going to look at this from a point of view that is not practical common sense, but is instead theoretical and even abstract.
Not like you, usually. You usually seem to pride yourselves on keeping even abstract topics to the severely practical what-can-I-do-with-this level.
Well, we’ll see how it comes out. It may be just that way, it’s true.
A sus ordenes.
Consider your 3D life. It is in essence solitary and social, both. Its essence is separation, after all: separation in time, separation in space. That’s what 3D does, is separate things, so that they may be experienced in relative isolation. You don’t experience your teen years when you are in your fifties, nor you – well, you see the point. Life comes to you in little bits chronologically, and it sorts itself out geographically by the simple fact that you can be in only one place at a time.
But within that separation, you form or discover alliances.
Ah, like first love, in youth, when it seems to you that you have miraculously found someone else.
That’s one way. It isn’t always a romantic attachment. Sometimes it is a bond of blood: kinfolk. Sometimes it is a level of affinity of profession or talent or whatever. That is not the main point here. For whatever reason, sometimes one’s solitary existence finds someone else – or perhaps some thing else – a pet, an obsession like an art or skill, a study. But let us stay with animate companions, leaving for another day the lure of the non-animate. (We don’t quite want to say inanimate, as it reinforces a polarity that is only somewhat real.)
Having to deal with another (or with more than one other) person or animal requires (encourages) you to split your focus or to widen it. Neither way does it leave you as you were.
I take it you are saying more than would be implied by the care of something inanimate – a car, say, or a house.
The difference is that the non-animate affects you only passively (though that doesn’t mean insignificantly; think of power spots, for instance). We are looking at the difference in one’s mental life when another animate being shares the space. It is more than having to care for the pet, or having to come to terms with the other person or people. It is a qualitative change in the life you lead.
How?
You have heard of the concept of a temporary joint mind?
Very funny. Is that what is going on, merely by propinquity?
What else? That isn’t a concept applicable only when you’re thinking about it. Your fellow employees, your commuters in a car pool, your associates in any endeavor, from a phone call to a group televised meeting to those who are invisibly and insensibly connected via a book they all read, or a movie they all watch (at whatever time; it needn’t be simultaneous to be a real link): These are all examples of the invisible group mind. But how much greater when the participants are living together.
I suppose that’s why sometimes it becomes impossible to continue to live together?
That’s a big subject. Incompatible souls will find the propinquity difficult, perhaps intolerable, in the way that someone with a headache will object to someone banging on a drum. No fault on either end, necessarily, but an incompatibility in time and place.
The opposite is also true. Those with compatible souls will find the inevitable conflicts and frictions easily manageable.
This is a lot to derive from my taking care of a cat.
Everything in everybody’s life could be extrapolated into something pointing to a more “significant” subject. But we suggest – with a smile – that what is significant and what is not, is less obvious that you might assume.
Besides, we haven’t come to the end, which is: The needing to consider another as well as oneself can be used as a helpful experience. We don’t mean merely “Reduce selfishness,” though Lao-tse’s admonition is always appropriate; we mean, the other mind’s periodic interaction with yours may be used as a sort of reminder. What if, every time you interacted with another person or animal, you automatically responded by remembering Presence? Would that not be helpful? Entire monasteries have been founded merely so that the inhabitants could periodically wake each other up, and here you have the same opportunity without having to eat rice and pray at stated hours.
Very funny. But, an interesting thought.
Why should you rely on your own efforts exclusively when you can set your intent to have your environment help you?
So, today’s theme?
“Living with others, an opportunity.”
I may use that, okay. Thanks as always.