Sunday, February 20, 2022
3:30 a.m. John Glenn orbited the earth three times in 1962, a long, long time ago, when I was young. The date stuck in my mind.
Open for business, if you have something to pursue. I trust my slight headache will dissolve as we proceed. It usually does. And, writing that, I remember when headaches were daily companions, and I used to keep aspirin containers handy in desk drawers for use throughout the day.
We promised you insight into how one’s day-to-day meshed with the larger world’s unfinished business.
That seems a long time ago, and I see it was only Thursday.
Which fact, in itself, illustrates the point that time-slices, by severing your continuing consciousness, adds richness and complication and possibility to your lives. In effect, it puts an on-going experience into strobe lighting, putting everything into a certain perspective: a false perspective, but a vivid one.
I’ll set my switches, here. Proceed, then.
You remember the date of John Glenn’s flight, because you were extremely interested in spaceflight, and this was an emotionally important day. You do not remember most of your own important dates, mostly because you don’t see them reflected in the outside world. Some you do – your Gateway was December, 1992, and early in that month. But even there, could you give the exact dates? Even though you made notes at the time, and reproduced them, in effect, in extensive writing about that week?
No, but maybe it isn’t important that I do, or I would.
John Glenn’s flight was an important date for you, but it did not come as one date in the chain of dates that was his life. You see?
It isn’t entirely clear. So far, I only sort of get what you’re driving at.
It is easier to remember specific islands than to individually record every wave in the ocean.
Again?
An “external” event is an island in one’s experience of life. Internal events are often perceived as a continuity, like waters being navigated.
Oh, I get it. But sometimes internal events are like islands.
Most often, an internal event that is remembered, is remembered in terms of an external event. The fact that the date of the external event may not be remembered does not change the fact. Thus, the internal changes produced in you – released in you, one might say – by your Gateway experiences are remembered. Perhaps the specific day of the week in which they occurred is remembered (or perhaps not); but the date, not being itself important, may be let go as unnecessary. Sequence is relevant; specific longitude and latitude of the island may be less so, or may be entirely not relevant.
Now, correlate this simple fact with what you know of types of consciousness. Being awake in the here, now, is one way to live. Being half in the here, now, and part in daydreams, reflections, projections into the future (worry or anticipation) is another. Being entirely unaware of the here, now – living in it but not really noticing it – is yet another. One’s experience of life depends upon one’s experience of time as one goes along. We told you long ago, the more conscious you are at any one moment, the more that moment seems to expand, the more you seem to absorb. In effect, the slower the time seems to “pass.”
In crisis moments, I’m told, time can appear to be coming in split-seconds, allowing more time to react.
And in moments of boredom or of general lack o awareness, time may “go by” in large unnoticed chunks, so that even if every moment is excruciatingly boring and seems to take forever, yet in aggregate they leave little or nothing behind.
But it is not duration or perceived duration that we whish to discuss at the moment, but the relation between individual life and corporate life (call it); that is, between personal and shared subjectivity. This is your life in the world: the simultaneous experience of your own sequence of events and the even that appears to be happening outside of you.
I get the feeling that this is a slippery topic.
It is, at least, an ambiguous one. On the one hand, we need to describe something that is endlessly familiar to you all; on the other hand, we need to show you its nature in an unfamiliar context. On the one hand, you are likely to say, “Well naturally! Tell me something I don’t know,” and on the other you are likely to say, “That’s something of a stretch, don’t you think?” Same description, seen from two viewpoints, equally valid.
Well, ”You do the best you can.”
That’s it. We are pointing out that what the reader can get from this depends partly upon what the reader can bring to it.
Understood.
It is always true, but particularly true when considering a familiar subject from an unfamiliar vantage point. However, there is nothing to do but make the attempt.
You are in a given place, at a given moment in time. This means:
- You are where and when your life to date has brought you.
- Your unfinished business from the current lifetime is a certain set of concerns. These are imbalances that have accumulated as you have lived: traumas, opportunities, regrets, even satisfactions. They are your situation going forward, considering only what has accumulated around you personally.
- But you also have unfinished business that may express through you but was generated in other lives – and it doesn’t matter whether you consider them “past lives” or merely resonances from others of similar composition.
- And you have unfinished business that may express through you even though it is not particularly connected with you in this life, nor with your resonances from other lives. That is to say, who and what you are, where and when you are, may allow things to pass through you mostly because the time and place facilitates it.
All these forms of unfinished business may activate at any moment, all of them or any one of them, or any two of them. You wonder that your lives can be confusing?
Now look at any given moment from the hypothetical viewpoint of the shared subjectivity. We say “the hypothetical viewpoint” because for the purpose of the discussion, we have to treat it as if it were an individual, but really it consists of all individuals, hence not individual at all. But for the sake of the argument, we will treat the shared subjectivity as if individual.
The shared subjectivity – “the world” – experiences each moment of time as opportunity. Consider it as if alive in the same manner as you, although this isn’t quite true. (The nature of the consciousness experienced by “everything” is of course going to be different from that experienced by any one splinter of it.)
- Any given moment offers certain opportunities of expression.
- Any given place (that is, a moment considered in a confined geographic location) also offers certain limited opportunities for expression.
- Any given individual’s choices allow or disallow certain opportunities for expression. Bear in mind, here, that there are many kinds of individual. A country may be considered as a kind of individual. A class of people with a shared set of viewpoints may: engineers, or liberals, or crossword-puzzle enthusiasts, or redheads, or skateboarders. That is, different clumpings of traits may be considered as individual, depending upon context.
So, the shared subjectivity, too, experiences possibilities and limitations. And notice, which one is the one that you as individuals, and the shared subjectivity – the world as a whole – share as possibility?
Oh, I got that. Sort of saw it coming.
Well, haven’t we been saying from the beginning that free-will was the key to life, that you are here to decide on an on-going basis who and what you wanted to be? That implies what you do and don’t wish to (or perhaps feel impelled to) express as judgments.
Your decisions affect the shared subjectivity in more than one way:
- Your decision changes you, and hence adds to your own personal unfinished business, even as it may also subtract from it, if you are fortunate.
- It changes the world., to whatever minute extent, hence affects the backup of unfinished business “the world” consists of.
- But it can only occur in the here and now; it can only occur when you are present and accounted for, when you are
Enough for the moment: There’s your hour.
And today’s theme?
“Personal and shared subjectivity,” perhaps.
Our thanks for this, as always.