Wednesday, April 13, 2022
4:10 a.m. Continuity (2)? Focus, receptivity, clarity, presence. I see I have lost track of where you were going with it, thought I knew yesterday. Re-reading yesterday’s helps, but doesn’t quite bring me there. So, it’s up to you, as usual.
Up to us, as usual. But – to quote your father – we’ve done all right so far.
I’m smiling, remembering the context.
The point we were making began with us saying we would describe playing catch between non-3D and 3D. Communicating, in other words. But for you to really understand what goes on, you need to remember that this is all mind-stuff interacting; it is not material v. non-material except in a way. Therefore the relative divisions that are so inescapably obvious to you are not – could not be – absolute divisions, merely relative ones. It is a difference of emphasis, not a difference in kind, when you look closely enough. That goes for communication but it also goes for 3D life itself. The very life you lead, with all its interest, its complications and hardships and memorable moments good and bad (to coin a phrase!) is a part of something larger that is of the same nature. The key to many of the enigmas of life lies in this simple inescapable fact.
It’s only somewhat real.
We are well aware that “only somewhat real” is, itself, only somewhat real to you, flickering in and out of your understanding depending upon many things. But at least you are now aware of the concept. Better a flickering awareness than none.
Let’s try to set the scene. The overall stage is the non-3D universe as best you can imagine it. One small part of that stage is the 3D world. (That is, 3D reality as a whole, not merely planet earth. It should be obvious, but we keep repeating ourselves on this point, just in case.) The 3D world is a sort of slowed-down version of reality, allowing the portions of the one mind to experience themselves as plural and as subjectively and objectively experienced. Both, at the same time. Singular and plural; subjective and objective; separate and connected.
Explanations of reality always center on certain aspects that are clear and persuasive to the explainer. That doesn’t mean it (any “it”) is the only way to see things once you have descended from the generalized “all is one” sense of unity. You must, by definition, be seeing things only partially. Each person will see what most closely matches the pattern that they are, as allowed by the filters that are “the times” and as precipitated by the unfinished business – that is, the activated elements – of the shared subjectivity.
Thus, individual awareness may be seen as truncated awareness, and it may be seen as the world-mind’s cutting-edge. Both ways of seeing it are accurate; which way each awareness is experienced is in part a matter of choice.
Sometimes we see life as real, with real pain for people, real injustice, real frustrations and achievements. Sometimes we see behind the surface for a moment, and we sort of understand that our reality is less real than it seems to be, but mostly the world is mighty convincing.
We are attempting to persuade you to try living as if the world is real and also as if the world is but a stage-play. Not either, but both. In other words, we want to enable you to live as if things were somewhat real. But remember, that doesn’t mean, “Things that hurt only hurt somewhat.” It doesn’t mean, “A sort of lukewarm commitment is the only rational approach to living.” It means, life even at its most intense and dramatic, pleasant or unpleasant, is real at its own level (just as your senses tell you) and is unreal at a higher level (just as your intuitions tell you). Both, not one or the other.
I watched the first two-thirds of “Saving Private Ryan” again last night, and will finish today sometime. Certainly it is easy enough to be caught up in the drama. Yet (strange feeling, if it weren’t so customary for me) at the same time I’m watching it as a play among shadows. I don’t mean, I’m seeing it as a film production, and am unable to be caught up in the drama. Instead, it’s more that I am seeing that life itself is a sort of film production. Hard to put it into words, and impossible to do so convincingly.
Look at it this way. There is the entire 3D universe, a slowed-down expression of the larger universe of which it is a part. Everything within it is subject to the law of conservation of energy, emotionally no less than physically. The shared subjectivity has its reservoir of unfinished business, and that reservoir – which is being continually drawn from, continually refilled, by human action and reaction – is physical and emotional and mental all at once.
You’re going to clarify the nature of the vast impersonal forces for us.
We’re going to try. We may have created as much confusion as we have dispelled, leaving that concept undefined. Yet, defining it prematurely would have created confusion twice compounded.
I have been seeing the vast impersonal forces as what scriptures call spirit, or chi, or the energy that sustains the world. But I have been hearing, too, that the structure imposed by the times and by the contents of the shared subjectivity that we experience as “the world” or as “the racial unconscious” are what shapes how these energies manifest.
Refocus again.
All right.
All 3D life includes what you tend to put into separate mental buckets: emotion, thought, any non-3D accompaniment of physical reality. Your mental and emotional world is not only as real as the physical world you experience; it is closer to you as individuals. It is, in a sense, realer. This crossover point is the nub of things, you see.
I do, but I couldn’t express it. Hanging on, here.
Once you move from taking the “external” world’s separation from you as a given, a halfway house mentally is to see it
Sorry, lost it.
Life ultimately doesn’t care how many steps Thomas Jefferson took on any given day, how many bricks he caused to be baked, how well or badly he interacted with legislators or governments or neighbors or slaves. (Servants, as he would have said.) That is, the physical actions and realities themselves seem solid to you (by design, after all!) but what is enduring is not the 3D but the changes in non-3D that were generated in 3D.
Thomas Jefferson’s horse-rides do not live. His thoughts and emotions do. And what is true for the famous is equally true for those unknown to their own times, let alone to history. In all the world, there was only one Julius Caesar, and his presence and activity was important and irreplaceable and could not be duplicated. But does that mean that everybody else on the earth was an extra in his movie? From his own point of view, yes, that’s how he would have to experience them, just as you and all of you do. But from his own point of view, the world around him would clearly have its own reality and would go on just fine without him. Both true, not merely one.
Well, look at life from a God’s-eye perspective, that is, as it seems without 3D limitations on thought and feeling. The life of the universe pours into 3D continually, fueling and animating it. Those energies express through the moving structure of possibilities that you call “the times.” Certain things are more possible, other things are less possible, at different times, and this is regulated by regular cycles that are signposted by (not caused by) the positions of planets and stars as surroundings. This channeled energy meets the moment’s situation (the “unfinished business” of any given moment) and expresses through whatever individuals are active. Those individuals are themselves the product of past structures and past decisions, and their on-going decisions help shape future possibilities directly (by choosing their paths) and indirectly (by what they add to the world’s unfinished business). A Caesar’s contribution may be more public; an unknown individual’s contribution may be entirely private and yet not a bit less important in what it can open the way for. Do you think thousands of monks praying for God’s peace to lighten the world had no effect because they had no p.r. agents, and because history passes them by in silence?
Enough for now?
Yes. Try to absorb this as you go about your day. That is, blend it into different contexts. Even occasional stray thoughts in this direction will help. You’ll see.
Our thanks for all this, as always.