Wednesday, March 9, 2022
5:30 a.m. Yesterday’s small Zoom meeting resulted in Jane Peranteau and Jane Coleman and I discussing two big topics with you – two that I can remember, anyway. One was love and gravity being the same thing. The other, before that, skipped my mind last night when I was trying to recall it, and returned before I fed the cat this morning. What was it? Was it about perceiving things as good and evil, or was that only this morning’s thought? Because, when I woke up but hadn’t quite mobilized myself to get up, I found myself dictating sentences – which of course I knew I would lose, which meant I was wasting my time. The first time I noticed this, some weeks ago now, I compared the process to Hemingway having stories come to him, and losing them if he couldn’t begin working then and there to get them into shape. This time it was merely recognition of the prospective waste of energy.
So, I set my switches, and we’ll see what happens. What was that other theme we discussed? F, R, C, P. Or, if for some reason you don’t want to remind me of the other main topic – which they were also unable to remember, interestingly enough – let’s talk about whatever you want to talk about. More about the body?
Your intent is too diffused, so far. You don’t realize it.
I did set my intent. So why is it not pointed?
The time and the place and your mental gears.
Isn’t that what setting our intent is supposed to overcome?
It is: to mesh. But you are worrying at the half-remembered topic, and the process of picking at it (“Why can’t they tell me? Why don’t I remember it?”) actively interferes with one-pointed concentration. Surely, that is obvious.
It is, once you mention it. So I’ll let go of it. What shall we discuss?
One final thing: Once you concentrate, it can be our topic or yours. Whose it is, doesn’t so much matter. That it is one thing and not two or more, is what matters.
All right, I can see that. I did have a thought the other day, as I matter of fact. I was thinking to ask you of something that plays out as mind but may really be body. And I hope you remember what it was, because that’s as much as I can recall.
We smile, because at least you are one-pointed about it. That is, you do know there was something, you do mention that there was something, but since you do not remember more, you don’t go looking for it, but stay where you are on solid ground.
Solid quicksand, you mean.
No, because it is only a metaphor. To change metaphor, you are single-minded about the little you remember, rather than letting your flashlight beam wander, looking for what is not in sight.
And we have managed to kill 20 minutes on this, going nowhere.
The description of mental processes, including malfunction or lack of focus or whatever, is in itself potentially helpful. It all adds up, for anyone paying attention. Or do you think others won’t recognize the same sate of affairs?
If you say so. So, you choose.
The point we were able to put across yesterday about love and gravity is worth putting on the record. Two points, really:
- Love and gravity are the same thing seen differently.
- That is the only force that has no opposite. It is the organizing principle.
Yes, we found it compelling. More like three points than two, though. The “organizing principle” is an explanation of why it has no opposite, I suppose, but it seems a separate characteristic, to me.
It hardly matters how you number it. The point is that it be recognized.
So, love has no opposite force, nor does gravity. Everything else in the 3D world (gravity) or the non-3D world (love) has a counterforce and a reconciling factor. That is how a stable but flexible system is maintained. But the organizing principle of that system must be uncontradicted, or it can not be a unitary system but, at best, a duality.
Let us say this carefully. Life within the system is structured in dualities; the system itself is not a duality but a seamless unity.
It is not a house divided against itself.
Precisely. As Jesus pointed out, a house divided against itself cannot stand. A system that contained its own contradiction is not a system but a sub-system. Those theologians and philosophers who persisted in seeing the world as “good or evil” naturally wound up thinking the world fundamentally a battleground, or a chaos, depending upon their other assumptions (mistaken by them for perceptions or for necessary postulates or conclusions).
While we were writing that out, I remembered that it was something to do with good and evil in the garden. Adam and Eve did not get a sudden accession of knowledge in the fable, as it usually assumed. They got a sudden change of view that saw nudity as bad, whereas before it had been just an accepted condition of life. Now, who knows what the originators of the fable meant by “saw that they were naked” – I imagine they meant more than “physically unclothed” – but the point is that they had begun to judge. God had created the world and found it good; now his creatures were finding parts of it evil. It isn’t even that their judgment differed from his, but that they had begun to judge.
And judge, necessarily, incompetently. What creature is able to fully comprehend the circumstances of its creation, and the nature of its surroundings?
Sometime yesterday it occurred to me, thinking about your saying that love has no opposite, that maybe that is a deeper meaning of the saying that “God is love.” I have always taken that to be a sort of sentimental generalization, but I see that in fact it may be sheer description. That is, what people perceive as God – the ultimate uncontradicted force that suffuses the created universe – might just as well be called love, which shares those characteristics.
You have been learning, throughout your long recuperation from the rigors of Catholic school, that things that were learned by rote and often taught only by rote were the skeleton of living realities. There was a point to centuries of earnest theological contention, you see. It wasn’t merely the clash of egos or the promotion of personal or dogmatic or even national self-interest. Human self-interested manipulation always enters into such things, but the root of them is that people take seriously certain questions, because their view of reality is important to them, and will be affected by whatever conclusions they feel the data and reasoning lead them to.
That came out awkwardly. I think you mean, people earnestly debated these things because the truth was important to them, and they were doing their best to come to it.
Ye. And parasitic considerations like politics and economics and corrupt self-interest are always to be encountered in any human endeavor, as the consequences of 3D separation leading to people thinking themselves separate. But the nub of the questions are always genuine.
And better to realize that these are real questions than to dismiss them as foolishness or smokescreens.
Ah, “Better.” How was the apple?
Oh, very funny. But you know full well that in practice we do judge things as better and worse. How can we not?
But you see, that is the very point of the Biblical story. Once you have fallen into seeing things as good or evil, can there be a going back to the naïve acceptance lived, for instance, by animals? You could say that the story of eating the apple is mere description of your situation.
Only, it sems to me you are all about our overcoming that fall into duality.
But it isn’t so easy. Has everything changed because for 50 years people have learned to say, “All is one,” even while engaged in protest marches, so to speak?
Touché. Still –
We aren’t taking back anything we have said. We merely point out that regaining perspective is the first step, not the final step.
And call this session – ?
“Love and gravity,” maybe.
Maybe. All right, our thanks as always.
6:45. Now I remember what else emerged in our Zoom session, it was that what we as individuals want may not be what we, as parts of the larger being we were created from, want.