Beginning to look at a country’s karma

Friday, February 25, 2022

3:25 a.m. A sus ordenes, jefe. Setting switches for maximum focus, receptivity, clarity, presence, having wakened from a dream and decided to begin. Yesterday you said you’d look at the concept of a country’s karma, treating the country as an entity in itself, rather than as an aggregation of human individuals.

Just as with abstractions at the human level, countries are collections of smaller communities and are a part of a larger community, but may be looked at as if individual.

May I? I got the idea, but I don’t think that says it. Humans are communities becoming individual; at least, that’s one way to look at us. At the same time, we are a part of a larger organization which we rejoin consciously upon death. You’re saying it is the same for countries.

And for other abstractions, yes. Only, it seems to us we just did say that. However, your rephrasing may help somebody, and is unlikely to hurt.

For the moment, we will not consider the larger entity that a country may be considered to be a part of. It is not as simple as thinking of a country in terms of the United Nations; it is an entirely different order of things from politics or economics or any other human-centered obsession. Some other time, we may go into this. For the moment, we will stick to things more easily understood from where you are now.

A country may be understood as comprising:

  • The humans, the geography, the biota, the minerals, etc., that are included within it, as one order of generalization. The 3D.
  • The non-3D aspects that have accumulated around it in human terms: its history, legends, representations (Marianne, for the French, John Bull, Uncle Sam, etc.). The undefinable but definite emotional picture that has developed over time.
  • The energy of the land itself, which may be considered to be both 3D and non-3D.

You understand, this example is a good one because of the difficulties it presents. Depending upon which characteristics one concentrates on, other characteristics essentially disappear from view, even though of course they remain.

America as natural resources is not the same (in our minds) when we are considering it as history, or as the attempt to achieve an ideal.

That’s more or less correct. In a way, it’s no different than anything else being analyzed, in that what is being concentrated on naturally takes on an exaggerated importance, if only for the time of the examination in that context. The specific difficulty here is that you may find it impossible to stop your mind from invisibly sliding from one definition of a country to another. Mixing categories can confuse things, but particularly when the categories themselves are something of a mixture.

It is tempting to use America as example, but its advantages as model are balanced by disadvantages. The very fact that most of your readers, and certainly you yourself, are actually physically and mentally entangled in it lends a certain intimacy of understanding, yet, correspondingly, a certain inability to easily get a detached view. In some ways it would be easier to look at almost any other country, for just that reason.

Well, we’ll go where you take us.

You may be willing to go where we would like to take you, but would you be able to do so? Neither you nor we can know until we try. And your lack of knowledge of other countries’ external history, let alone their internal history (call it) makes it difficult.

So the instruction hinges on human history?

That is the interface between you and the entity at a different level of abstraction. If we were considering the created soul of a novel, or a machine, or any manmade things, you can see that it would have to touch upon the human element; would probably have to center on it.

By that reasoning, to discuss humans, you’d have to touch upon, perhaps to center on, their creator or creators.

Isn’t that one of the things we have been doing, these 25 years? We have had to inch up on it carefully, so as not to activate the tripwires around theology and even teleology so widely shared in your time, but, as you say, we can’t sketch an accurate picture of Moby-Dick without referencing the whale.

So let us look at America and see where we go. We have to entirely omit its unknown human prehistory, because it provides you no place to grasp it, but of course that prehistory exists, even though forgotten. What we mean to say is, human have forgotten it; America as land has not. But although that –

Well, a word on that subject. One reason why countries have their own nature, their own characteristics, which affect each successive civilization, is that “the land” itself remembers what humans forgot or never knew. One could say that a land’s “karma” is affected by the human activities that went on and wove themselves into that physical environment, even though later generations don’t know it.

The analogy that comes to mind is that we as adults don’t remember our infancy or perhaps much of our childhood or even perhaps our adolescence, but we have nevertheless been shaped by them.

Yes, good analogy. The soul of America is affected – grew from – events and civilizations from before the flood. And the same of every land on earth.

To make that clearer, I got that you are seeing the influence of the land in strata.

Yes.

  • Known history of political units. Below that,
  • Legendary history of peoples prior to political organization. Below that,
  • The land itself, perhaps unpeopled. Below that,
  • Forgotten peoples and civilizations, who may or may not have left discoverable traces, but certainly left their mark on the land’s “soul,” or, we should say, “soul-materials,” for at the level we are discussing, there is no soul at that level until the country is in being.

Did I garble that last?

A little, but let’s leave it and move on; the clock is moving, and we must move with it.

Of the four layers of strata we mentioned, the lower two – in some contexts, the lower three – are out of focus, unconsidered. Nonetheless, like an individual’s unconscious mind, they have their effect.

Understood.

So let’s look at America. As a political entity, it may be considered to begin with the Revolutionary War, or with the founding of the British colonies. Even so arbitrary a starting-point is not nearly so clear-cut as may appear. For instance, the political organization of the Indians that Benjamin Franklin referenced * has a part in America’s political organization after the war, yet obviously existed long before it. The way of life of the Indians affected the European colonists in uncounted ways, in all aspects of everyday life including intangibles like the allure of a free and wandering life. The life of the Indians was itself affected by that unseen group karma; it [Indian life], by being tangible, affected this next layer of inhabitants.

But, for the purpose of analysis, let’s start with the founding of the colonies. You may not realize it, but the first people to arrive were not only European in their civilization; they were also mostly medieval in their mindset. You may not realize it, mostly because they did not realize it. The Renaissance had been gathering steam for a hundred years, but it was a slow process of change, and the men and women who landed in what became Virginia and Massachusetts were far closer to medieval than to even the mindset of the revolutionists. That is, they mostly were still the children of their homes; they were not yet the children of their new homes. But that new home began shaping them, and never let up. Peter Jefferson, Daniel Boone, thousands of unknown settlers, explorers, experiencers, were the product of their new environment. John James Audubon, intellectually trained as a European might have been, nonetheless was indelibly and unmistakably American. As John Adams noted, the American revolution had taken place silently in people’s minds before it expressed itself in action.

Somehow we have gone through an hour, and you’re scarcely launched.

No matter. Giving you all things to chew on it what we’re about. We’re traveling hopefully; we’ll arrive at some point.

Assuming I live long enough! Okay, today’s theme? For, I don’t think we went where we thought we were going to go.

Perhaps, “Examining the strata comprising a country.”

Maybe “What is a country really?”

Maye, “A Different order of individual.”

None of these seems exactly right. I’ll wait for the inspiration of the moment when transcribing. Thanks for all of this. Tell next time.

* See, for example, https://www.pbs.org/native-america/blogs/native-voices/how-the-iroquois-great-law-of-peace-shaped-us-democracy/

 

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